Phaptawan Suwannakudt works in interdisciplinary forms that include painting, sculpture, and installation. Her work is based on lived experience and informed by socio-political issues through telling stories and intersections between different human experiences. It has often dealt with issues of empathy and commensurability informed by Buddhism, women’s issues, and cross-cultural dialogue. She trained as mural painter in her father’s workshop, the late master Paiboon Suwannakudt, who was a writer, poet, dancer, and choreographer. Her early childhood involved reading her father’s manuscripts and learning Thai mural painting drafting skills. In her teens she was sent to read Thai poetry with the late poet, artist Chang Sae Tang. Phaptawan worked on a year contract as an ESL teacher to Vietnamese, Lao and Khmer refugees for UNHCR at Nongkhai Refugee camp on the border of Thailand. Later she became the first woman to lead a temple mural painting team in Thailand in 1990. Earlier work outside Buddhist temple schemes examined some of the gendered restrictions that have both shaped and limited her art practice. This has since expanded to a multi-layered structure that includes elements which produce visual distortion such as mirror, sheer fabric, and Perspex sheets. They have often involved the use of Thai text, sometimes with sensorial elements such as sound and scent.

Phaptawan has exhibited extensively in Australia, Thailand and internationally including the18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations (2012); Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia, Museum of Anthropology, UBC, Vancouver, Canada (2017); the inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale, Thailand (2018); Asia TOPA, Art Centre Melbourne (2020); The National 2021 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021); ESOK Jakarta Biennale, STOVIA Museum of History of National Awakening, Indonesia (2021), Line Work: The River of the Basin at the Lewers’ House, Penrith Regional Gallery New South Wales (2021), Presence of Mind, Lane Cover Gallery (2021) Leave it and Break no Hearts, 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok Thailand (2022), Asia Art Archive at the documenta 15, Kassel 2022, Womanifesto: Flowing Connections, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand 2023, The Womanifesto Way: Sydney Gathers, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Her works are in public collections including the Art Bank Sydney, The Rama IX Art Collection: the National Art Gallery of Thailand, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the National Gallery Singapore. Current project: The completion of a 384-square-metre mural, The Birth of the Buddha and the Thipniyaay Aou Siam, at the Theppol temple, Talingchan District, Bangkok where her father, Paiboon started in the early 1970s, during which she was a child, raised and trained by him. The scheme involves her new composition design based on Paiboon's original plan.