La Inthonkaew
La, Daughter of the Sun

She was born in a small village in central Thailand. Her father was a respected village shaman, her uncle a Buddhist monk, and, in keeping with family tradition, all the women were midwives.

La completed only four years of elementary school. When she was eleven, her father died tragically, and she had to provide for herself and her younger siblings by hunting and gathering fruit in the jungle. Later, she worked as a construction laborer, cook, cleaner, and masseuse. At the age of fifteen, she gave birth to her first daughter; today she has three children and two grandchildren. Around the year 2000, she came to Europe and settled in Prague, where she worked as a masseuse and got married.

In 2004, while visiting her hometown of Phuket, she miraculously survived the tsunami. This traumatic experience awakened in her a profound need to create. Although she had painted as a child—using every scrap of paper, along with mud and plant dyes—from that moment on, painting took on an entirely new meaning. It became a magical ritual, a means of contacting another dimension of existence. She began to paint intensely, yet her then-husband discarded her works with equal intensity.

La paints obsessively, sitting in the traditional Thai way on the floor, most often late at night. For her, the paintings are not artistic objects but metaphysical acts. They feature people, animals, and plants, infused with both Thai and Czech realities, and she frequently interweaves self-portraits into this imagery.

— Sonia Wilk