Jiab Prachakul: Welcome Back

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present Welcome Back, an exhibition of new paintings by Thai-born, France-based artist Jiab Prachakul, on view from 5 June through 11 July in London. This marks the artist’s debut solo exhibition in the UK and follows her first solo museum presentation at The Contemporary Austin. Bringing together nine new canvases, the exhibition considers memory, distance, and presence through depictions of those closest to the artist.

In her luminous autobiographical paintings, Prachakul portrays her community and surroundings in quiet scenes shaped by close observation and restrained emotion. She paints herself, her husband, and friends—many of them designers, artists, and musicians of the Asian diaspora living in Europe—with a strong sense of familiarity, which, as the artist notes, “invites us into a series of longing conversations with a circle of my close friends.” These figures are often set in quotidian environments, such as street corners, living rooms, and along urban waterways, and are bathed in a warm, ambient light. This glow lends the scenes a subtle romanticism, heightened by Prachakul’s attention to pattern and her sensitivity to the way clothing frames the body. As in the work of Alice Neel and Lucian Freud, familiar figures recur throughout her paintings, allowing relationships to unfold over time.  

Many of the works in this exhibition feature scenes of Berlin, where Prachakul lived for eight years before settling in Vannes, Brittany. In May 2025, the artist returned to the city and spent time with friends in familiar places, gathering images that informed this series. In Welcome Back (2025), two women—twins who appear elsewhere in Prachakul’s paintings—pose for a photograph, conveying warmth and ease. One holds a vibrant bouquet, while the other carries a jacket whose pattern echoes the cobblestoned street. They stand before a späti (a late-night convenience shop) in the Alt-Treptow neighbourhood, where the artist lived when she first moved to the city seventeen years ago. The store emits a distinctive yellow light that Prachakul associates with these spaces; while she once found their atmosphere “brutal and a bit miserable,” she now recalls them with a sense of affection. 

Pink Moon (2026) depicts the artist and her husband, both in  black coats, gazing over the Landwehr Canal at Maybachufer—a point where three waterways intersect: the Spree near Alt-Treptow, Kreuzkoelln, and Neukoelln. For Prachakul, this site reflects her many years in Berlin, dating back to when she taught herself to paint. Here, the reflection of a starry sky shimmers on the water and in the thicket of leaves above the figures; even the gravel walkway seems to glimmer. A radiant pink moon introduces a surreal note, echoed by a large cat perched on a gate. The cat, drawn from the artist’s neighbour in Vannes, is inserted into the scene, suggesting the ways in which contexts and realities converge in memory. 

A similar incandescence characterises A Meeting By The River (2025), a self-portrait in which the artist lounges in the sun beside a glittering body of water that appears both placid and expansive. Prachakul’s black heels and clothing anchor her figure amid the refracted light and a swath of undulating grass. The artist describes the painting as a meditation on midlife. After revisiting Berlin and reckoning with change, foreignness, and familiarity, she found a renewed sense of ease in Vannes, grounded in a deeper relationship to herself.