Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya

SOULSCAPE A Moment in Constant Transforming Tawatchai Somkong

Curator's Note

Delving into artist Tawatchai Somkong’s enigmatic series “Soulscape” will require us to go back more than a hundred years to when Rabindranath Tagore was walking the plains of Santiniketan, envisaging building an art school. In 1919, Kala Bhavana was founded, and with Tagore’s direction, it became a space where artistic learning unfolded in the open air, in close communion with nature, and free from rigid academic instruction. Situated amid the red laterite soil, scattered sonajhuri (Earleaf Acacia) forests, and expansive skies of Birbhum, the school grew organically out of the landscape itself. This environment would eventually shape one of the most distinctive traditions of Indian art, the Santiniketan approach to landscape painting. The term “soulscape” evokes more than a physical setting; it suggests an interior terrain formed by emotion, memory, and spiritual experience. In Tawatchai Somkong’s practice, this idea becomes especially resonant because his paintings do not treat Santiniketan simply as a geographical site. Instead, they transform it into a deeply personal, psychological topography where the world he encountered in India merges with the sensibilities he carries from his own culture. His soulscapes draw not only from the red earth, sal groves, and open skies of Santiniketan but also from the lyrical, spiritual aesthetics embedded in Thai visual culture. What emerges is not a record of observation but an evocation of essence fluid, selective, and tinged with nostalgia.

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