Nina Vichayapai is a pie-contest-entering horse girl with dual citizenship. She can be found ogling fine canines at dog shows or attempting to chop it up with cool car people in auto shops. Her art explores what it means to be at the intersections of these and many more niche interests and identities. She invites you to be neighbors with her in occupying these strange intersections and celebrate yours as well.
Nina charts the peripheries and margins of society by drawing on personal lived experiences, research, and social practice. Her work is the delight that is found when detouring on an unmarked road that leads to a party. Whether that means gathering people together to commiserate about the things they regret buying, getting in touch with the childhood dreams of horse girls, or facilitating group road trips to learn about the experiences of rural Asian Americans, Nina likes to linger within the bounds of oddly specific experiences.
Her interest in unlikely intersections arises from her own origins. Nina was born in Thailand, a sunny and tropical place, and grew up in a Pacific Northwest suburb which was cold, rainy, and had very few Thai people. A sense of belonging for Nina was often fleeting. Found in moments such as learning the intergenerational practice of sewing from her mom, or feeling like she had become a real American after dressing up as a cowboy.
Nina’s multidisciplinary art practice and ever changing aesthetics hints at her obsessive nature in researching subjects to create work in the language of the subcultures she explores. She uses interventionist design strategies, often mixes digital and analog ways of making, and employs an eclectic tool-box of studio based skills from printmaking, photography, textiles and more.
Nina graduated from the California College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.
Instagram: @Nvichayapai
Email: Nvichayapai@gmail.com
