Tashi Brauen
Solo exhibition, Second Pass, 2026
Second Pass presents works created during Tashi Brauen's residency in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, where photographs and found magazine imagery are transformed through monotype and printmaking processes. The works offer a renewed way of seeing the overlooked beauty in everyday forms.
The act of art making is fundamentally an act of transmutation. Objects and images are transformed and shifted to reveal new meaning, illuminate what was previously overlooked, and allow the artist’s voice to enter into conversation with the world. In “Second Pass”, Tashi Brauen invites viewers to look again, to slow down, pause, and reconsider the sublime potential of the everyday.
Brauen’s works encourage a second encounter with the mundane. They ask viewers to notice beauty not as spectacle, but as something embedded in shapes, colors, lines, and rhythms that surround us constantly, yet often remain invisible at first glance. There is a quiet insistence here that attentiveness itself is a form of generosity, and that meaning is not fixed but discovered through sustained looking.
The source materials for Second Pass include both original photographs and imagery drawn from vintage magazines found in markets in Bangkok. These printed pages, already marked by time, circulation, and cultural context, carry their own histories before Brauen intervenes. By working with images that have already passed through other hands and other moments, the artist further complicates ideas of authorship, memory, and reuse. The act of alteration becomes not an erasure, but an extension.
Many of the photographs and magazine images were collected during Brauen’s residency in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, cities dense with visual information, contradiction, and texture. These images are altered and adorned with the artist’s signature restraint and precision, balancing deliberate compositional choices with painterly gesture and chance outcomes drawn from monotype and printmaking processes. Paint and ink are added both directly and through transfer methods, with many of the works completed using the etching press at Hello, Print Friend Studios in Chiang Mai.
In the monotype process, ink is first applied to clear plastic, where it can be manipulated, adjusted, and refined according to the artist’s vision. The image, whether photographic or printed ephemera, is then carefully placed atop the inked surface and run through the press, fusing found material and painterly intervention into a single object. The press itself is an art making tool that has remained largely unchanged for over 500 years and becomes part of the conceptual fabric of the work. Through it, Brauen brings a distinctly contemporary eye to a historic process, informed by a deeply multicultural life and an ongoing curiosity about how people inhabit space.
What emerges in Second Pass is neither purely photograph nor purely painting, but a layered conversation between mediums, time periods, and ways of seeing. Viewers are invited to encounter familiar forms anew, from baskets at the market to worn sidewalk tiles to repeated geometries pulled from printed pages. These transient, functional, and often overlooked structures become moments of quiet wonder and evidence that beauty does not demand grandeur, only attention.
SAC Gallery
160/3 Soi Sukhumvit 33 (Daeng Udom) Sukhumvit Rd., Klongton Nue, Wattana, Bangkok 10110 Thailand, Bangkok, 10110, Thailand
Curated by Miranda K. Metcalf
Link to exibition here.
About the artist
Tashi Brauen's interest lies in observing and subtly manipulating the characteristics of objects and everyday materials in relation to people and space. "It's an attempt to give a new view of different contemporary materials and the shapes surrounding us."
At the heart of Brauen's practice is a study about materials and surfaces reacting with different interventions. "When I use a new material, it's always an experiment. I start with bending and folding the new material and observing its characteristics. In the end, my intention is to keep the interventions to a minimum." From this experimentation, Brauen finds the fine balance between intentional actions and spontaneous outcomes. Brauen’s recent painting practice follows a path of reduction, resulting in vibrant minimalist color field paintings that center the viewing experience and the act of seeing. His ongoing ‘Du’ series explores found materials and rudimentary printing techniques by pressing paint between magazine pages.
Brauen lives in Zurich, Switzerland, and has exhibited internationally, including solo shows in Zurich, Basel, Berlin, Munich, and Bangkok, and participated in numerous group exhibitions across Europe and in the USA. His works are held in several Swiss public art collections, including Canton of Zurich, Canton of Berne, Wettingen Art Collection, as well as in The Luciano Benetton Art Collection, Treviso, Italy, and private collections worldwide.
