It is not the most obvious pairing — a Bangkok-born conceptual painter and a gallery on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Yet the representation of Aphist Sid by Gallery Merrick in Victoria, British Columbia feels less like an accident of geography than a curatorial statement of intent. Sid has been earning serious attention for years, and the West Coast is simply the latest place to catch up with him.
The Artist – Aphist Sid
Born in 1994, Sid completed his Master of Painting at the Faculty of Painting Sculpture and Graphic Arts at Silpakorn University, one of Thailand’s most respected institutions for the fine arts. He won the Panasonic Contemporary Painting Contest in both 2016 and 2017 — consecutive years, which is the kind of detail that stops you mid-sentence. A residency at No Name Studio in Shanghai followed in 2023, adding another chapter to a trajectory that has never moved in a straight line so much as an ever-deepening spiral.
PHOTOGRAPHY AS RAW MATERIAL
His process starts with photographs. Not his own — archival images, found pictures, snapshots that belong to another time and another context entirely. He takes them apart. Folds them, collages them, removes sections, distorts what remains, moves between analogue and digital manipulation before finally returning everything to paint. By the time a work is finished, the original photograph is more ghost than source — present in feeling, dissolved in form.
“Unplaced” by Aphist Side
His most recent body of work, Something Is Missing From Us, pushes this further. Each painting centres on a single figure, rendered with a realism so precise it reads almost as photographic, and then interrupted — a torn sheet of canvas obscuring a face, a geometric void where recognition should be, soft coloured orbs floating through an otherwise monochrome scene like thoughts that never quite landed. You look for the person and find instead the outline of one.
“Nothing to Hide” by Aphist Sid
IDENTITY AS ONGOING CONSTRUCTION
Sid is thinking about identity — not as something possessed but as something assembled, precariously, from fragments that do not always fit. He references Gerhard Richter in his conceptual framework, and the lineage makes sense: both artists treat photography not as documentation but as raw material for interrogating what images can and cannot tell us about being human.
“Space Where I Was” by Aphist Sid
“Barely Held” by Aphist Side
What sets Sid apart is the quality of the uncertainty he creates. His figures are not broken. They are mid-process — caught in the act of becoming something that the canvas never quite resolves. The blank planes cutting through each portrait are not absences so much as open questions, spaces where the self has yet to declare itself.
For Gallery Merrick, bringing Sid into their programme is a meaningful move. It speaks to a willingness to look far beyond the familiar and to trust that their audience is ready for work that asks something of them. Given what Sid is making, that trust seems entirely well placed.
“Don’t Act. Just Think.” by Aphist Sid
“Brotherhood” by Aphist Sid
“Two of Us” by Aphist Sid
Author Profile
- Helen Siwak is the founder of EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc and publisher of Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and PORTFOLIOY.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine. She is a prolific content creator, consultant, and marketing and media strategist within the ecoluxury and luxury lifestyle niches. Helen is the west coast correspondent to Canada’s top-read business magazine Retail-Insider, holds a vast freelance portfolio, and is an EIC for Hire. Connect with her here: [email protected].
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