Heard But Not Seen: Subverting the Commodified Gaze of Thai Women through Oral History in Video Art

In Materializing Thailand, Penny Van Esterik argues that the construction of Thai womanhood has long functioned as a tool of image-making and nation-building. Tourism campaigns and beauty pageants—often aligned with authoritarian regimes—have cast Thai women as symbols of modesty, grace, and chastity, commodified under both national and Western gazes.

My video work Umbilical (2024) subverts this dynamic by privileging voice over image. Rather than reinscribing the Thai female body as spectacle, the piece presents a 20-minute recorded conversation between myself and my mother, beginning with the question: “Mom, did you know you, grandma, and I were all one body once?” as a jumping off point in reflecting together how the lived experiences as a Thai woman cascade down the matrilinage. Here, tone, laughter, hesitation, and interruption form a truer portrait than image could.

By evoking the lived experiences of two Thai women without visually presenting their bodies, the work resists the assumptions often cast onto the Thai femme body in Western white cube spaces. It also demands the audience’s labor: meaning emerges slowly through listening, and the piece offers little to those seeking easy or partial consumption.

As a Thai woman artist working within predominantly white Western institutions, I remain acutely aware of the risks of exoticization and tokenization. Umbilical negotiates this dual condition by embracing instability and polyvocality—my mother interrupts, corrects, and resists me—rendering authorship unreliable and authenticity unsettled. In doing so, the work reclaims voice as feminist language, refusing essentialized representations while foregrounding multiplicity, specificity, and intergenerational dialogue.