From flip-flops to art: one season at a Thai residency

When you’re working on a style rather than just making something “pretty,” one of the biggest challenges is finding an environment where your visual language doesn’t need translating.

Sveta Yanetskaya, a student on the “I Want Into the Art World!” program, didn’t just change her geography — she shifted her focus to a market that sits closer to her work both visually and conceptually.

---

After finishing the “I Want Into the Art World!” program, I took Maria’s advice and decided to turn my attention to the Asian market.

And it made sense: my art has been drawing on East Asian cartoons for years.

I went to Thailand, to Phuket, to bring the ideas for my exhibition project to life.

There I met Thai artists who work at the Art Village residency — an authentic, atmospheric place in the south of the island, on the shore of the Andaman Sea. The residency has several studios, one for each artist. The art village also includes a few galleries, cafés and bars, a music venue and a merch shop.

This residency has one distinctive feature: the artists don’t only work on canvas. Their medium is the trash that they and other volunteers collect from the sea. Flip-flops, tires, plastic bottles and fragments of boats all get turned into art objects. It’s the artists’ way of keeping attention on the environment.

They welcomed me warmly and gave me a place in one of the studios. My mentor was Niran Chanhom. He currently works on large-scale paintings. Every day I was treated to matcha, drinking water and compliments on my work 😃 They set me up with an easel, a streamer’s chair, lighting, a fan (working outdoors in 37-degree heat is brutal) and any materials I was missing.

Because this residency is public, tourists often come by to relax, have fun and soak up the unusual setting. While you’re painting, people from all sorts of cultures may walk up to you: Thais, Germans, French, Russians and others. They pay you compliments — which feels wonderful and puts you in a completely different working mood than a studio on your own.

Sometimes they ask about the price right away, too.

It wasn’t only Thai artists working alongside me at the residency, but people from all kinds of countries. My studio had an artist from the Philippines and artists from Russia and Kazakhstan.

Making art here felt extraordinarily comfortable: my cartoonish style met no resistance and sat perfectly naturally in this environment, while the community’s support and the flood of new ideas around me gave me even more reason to create.

A huge thank-you to Maria for pointing me in the right direction ❤️