Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Bouquet and the Wreath

The Bouquet and the Wreath is Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s first large-scale survey exhibition. It takes place at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, bringing together artworks created over the past 45 years, as well as ambitious new commissions.

Flowers, beds, and words recur throughout the exhibition, reflecting the artist’s enduring preoccupations with desire and mortality, difference and curiosity. A bouquet of flowers may accompany a celebration, a friendship or courtship, or a joyous moment. Yet flowers in a wreath may also mark tragedy, a funeral, and mournful loss. A bed may be a space for rest, for romance and for sweet reveries. Yet a bed may also be a site of sickness, suffering and death. Araya’s artworks suggest that these happy and unhappy states may not be so separate.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957, lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand) is an artist, writer and professor, and one of Southeast Asia’s most respected contemporary practitioners. Araya has also played a major role in innovating arts education in Thailand, where she established the country’s first interdisciplinary art school curricula. At her home and studio in Chiang Mai, she cares for dozens of stray dogs, who often appear in her artworks.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s ‘The Bouquet and the Wreath’ is an exhibition curated by Kittima Chareeprasit and Roger Nelson, presented in two parts:

• At MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, from 26 July 2025 to 15 March 2026
• At Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, from 5 November 2025 to 15 March 2026

The exhibition will be accompanied by a landmark publication published by Press Works, which compiles a range of responses to Araya’s practice, from scholars, curators, artists and writers.

Image: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, ‘The Two Planets Series – Millet’s The Gleaners and The Thai Farmers’, 2008, courtesy of the artist.