Crossroads exhibition presents the works of Julien Spiewak (b. 1982, Paris) and Dow Wasiksiri (b. 1956, Bangkok), two photographers whose practices intertwine across time and geography to reconsider the relationship between East and West, past and present. Both artists examine how history persists not as a distant narrative but as a living presence within the visual and material fabric of contemporary life. Through the acts of staging, insertion, and rephotography, they open a dialogue between the inherited image and the contemporary body, suggesting that to look is also to inhabit, to claim, and to transform.
In Julien Spiewak’s series Corps de Style (2005–present), fragments of nude bodies are photographed within historic interiors, spaces once preserved for their aesthetic and social refinement. The artist’s lens navigates these environments with quiet precision, allowing flesh and fabric, body and ornament, to echo one another.
Dow Wasiksiri, one of Thailand’s most significant photographic voices, approaches the question of history from another direction. His series Conversations with the Past (2012) reengages colonial-era photography, a medium that once codified hierarchies of race, progress, and modernity.
Their works transform the dialogue between East and West into an evolving conversation about seeing itself: how we perceive, how we inherit, and how we continue to shape the visual memory of our shared world.
