Tuk-Tuks | 2025

About this work

On 20 December 2025, four pastel-colored Tuk-Tuks designed by Yuree Kensaku carried distinguished guests during a special celebration. What began as a design project unexpectedly became a journey back to a body of work she created more than twenty years ago.

The Tuk-Tuks grew out of drawings from 108 Paths to Vanity, Yuree’s 2004 solo exhibition at 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok. At the time, she was a young artist just beginning to find her voice. The late Petch Osathanugrah, founder of DIB Bangkok, generously wrote an essay for the exhibition. His encouragement at such an early stage of her career remains deeply meaningful, making this return especially poignant.

Two works from 108 Paths to Vanity were selected for (In) Visible Presence ล่องไม่หน, the inaugural exhibition of DIB Bangkok. Revisiting these works after more than two decades reveals how many of the themes that occupied Yuree’s early practice continue to reappear in new forms.

One of the exhibited works, Innocent X, was originally inspired by a painting by Diego Velázquez that Yuree encountered during a trip to Italy. While revisiting the work through the Tuk-Tuk project, she expanded the reference by drawing on Francis Bacon’s famous interpretations of the Pope. While Velázquez portrayed authority with elegance and grandeur, Bacon exposed something more fragile and conflicted beneath the surface.

This dialogue between reverence and resistance led Yuree back to the figure of the black sheep—a symbol of difference, exclusion, and perceived wrongdoing.

In these new works, the sheep appears fragmented and transformed into floating cuts of raw meat. Simultaneously humorous and unsettling, the image continues Yuree’s long-standing interest in using playful visual language to explore more complex emotional and social realities. The drifting fragments evoke questions of belonging, judgment, visibility, and what it means to be marked as different.

More than twenty years after 108 Paths to Vanity, Yuree finds herself returning to familiar questions through a new lens. The pastel-colored Tuk-Tuks become both vehicles and time machines, carrying fragments of earlier works into the present and revealing how ideas can continue to evolve across decades, mediums, and contexts.