TEXT & PHOTO: RATTHEE PHAISANCHOTSIRI
(For Thai, press here)
This series of photographs was taken between 2010 and 2011 when I was living in Japan as a fresh graduate. Like many students of product design at the time, Japan was a dream destination for many to pursue their education. It was a time when the Minimalist movement was flourishing.
But the transition from adolescence to working age—the period we call “coming of age”—turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had imagined. It wasn’t easy to strike a balance between reality and fantasy, between being realistic and prejudice-free. My own coming of age was filled with too many questions. Circulating in my mind were thoughts about life and death, as my body grew weaker by the day. How could I endure this feeling when the time has come for me to start living my life in the way that society has already determined?
It has been over twelve years and the childhood dreams I once had are no longer lucid like they used to be. Looking back to those memories in an attempt to compare them to the present I’m living in, in days when my age has progressed closer to the people in these pictures I took, in the time when technology has made all of our lives more convenient, but how we are living as human beings doesn’t seem that different from those days in the past. We are still struggling with the happiness we find ourselves with each passing day.
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Ratthee Phaisanchotsiri is an industrial designer and one of the members of the Issaraphap Collective who splits his time between Chiang Mai and Bangkok.
rattheephaisanchotsiri.com
instagram.com/rattheephaisanchotsiri