Epicenter periodically visits artists in their studios to gain insight into the processes and ideas that inform their work. We are especially interested in how the neighborhoods in which these studios are located shape artistic practice, and how communities across the city inspire and sustain that work — whether through access to materials, shared energy or everyday interactions.
Last week, I visited Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s studio in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Upon entering, the sight and scent of fabrics carefully arranged on shelves immediately transported me to the sari shops I reluctantly accompanied my mother to as a child during visits to India. While Amanda is of Thai and Indonesian-Chinese heritage, there are resonances across cultures. My father, a textile engineer, added another layer of association, as I took in the textures and materials in this light-filled, fabric-rich space where Amanda creates. I had first encountered her sculptural work at the Conductor Fair at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus.
Phingbodhipakkiya works across assemblage, sculpture and installation. Fiber has long been central to her practice, and in recent years she has expanded into ceramics, copper and wood, continually widening her materials vocabulary. She moved to New York City in 2006 and studied neuroscience with a focus on aging before fully committing to her art practice. She noted that strong community ties are among the most significant predictors of how we age — an idea that quietly underpins much of her work.
Her family history deeply informs her practice on multiple levels. The restaurant her family ran functioned not only as a source of their livelihood but as a site for gathering, exchange and care — an informal community hub. That ethos of hospitality and connection carries through her work today, where materials are layered, stitched and assembled in ways that evoke both protection and interdependence. The tactile qualities of fabric, in particular, suggest intimacy and memory, while her use of harder materials introduces a structural tension that mirrors the complexities of identity and belonging.
In the studio, these ideas take form through an intuitive yet deliberate process. Fragments accumulate, materials are tested against one another and compositions evolve through a balance of control and openness. The neighborhood itself plays a role in this rhythm: Bed-Stuy’s layered histories and vibrant street life echo in the work’s sensibility, reinforcing the importance of place as both context and collaborator.
What emerges is a practice that is materially rich and conceptually grounded, one that bridges personal history with broader questions of community, care and resilience.
Amanda graciously responded to some questions I posed about the connections between community and her artistic practice. What follows has been lightly edited by Epicenter’s editorial team.
What drew you to New York City, and to your current neighborhood?
I came to New York to dance. To audition. But movement was never separate from making, or drawing, sewing and writing. These weren’t disciplines. They were just how my family showed love and reminded ourselves of where we came from. New York was the only city where I could pursue all of it without a car, which is also what my parents needed to hear.
My freshman year I got injured skiing and had to learn to walk again. That kind of rupture, not being able to do the thing your whole sense of self was built around, it feels like an ending. And in some ways it was. But what unfolded on the other side was bigger and messier and more profound than anything I could have imagined.
I needed to understand what had happened to my body, why it suddenly felt foreign to me. That’s what drew me to neuroscience. Not curiosity. Something desperate and close.
But underneath all of it I was seeking a way to contend with fractures I’d been holding much longer. Growing up in a place where there weren’t many people like me. Not that there weren’t Asian folks, but not mixed in the way that I am. East Asian and Southeast Asian communities don’t always know each other across the distance, even when they live side by side, and when you inhabit both, you can find yourself not quite enough for either. Though I’ve also found that the longing to belong to both can become its own kind of bridge. And it runs deeper than that. Chinese Indonesians have faced centuries of persecution, pogroms, discriminatory laws, violence that erupted again as recently as 1998. In Thailand there is a long history of pressure on Chinese communities to assimilate, suspicion of their loyalties, policies designed to diminish their presence. Diasporas carry the biases of the homeland with them, in the parts of yourself you learn to hide in order to belong, or in the things you choose to unlearn. My Indonesian-Chinese and Thai inheritances don’t sit easily together. That tension is part of what I carry. It’s part of what I make from.
My practice begins in the body. In hands that learned to peel garlic before they learned to sew, before they learned to build. Rupture turned out to be the opening.
How has living or working in this community changed the way you make art?
I moved into this studio as we were coming out of the pandemic, which felt like emergence. The neighborhood buoyed me immediately. It’s walkable from my apartment, vibrant in a way that gets into the studio with you. I can see the trees outside swaying in the wind while the bass from passing cars keeps the heartbeat of the block. In the summer it feels like Southeast Asia in here, and I can step outside and the neighborhood kids are playing by the fire hydrant against an amber sky. That kind of aliveness gets into the work. Growth can come from precarious situations. Rupture and growth speak at the same time. This neighborhood knows that.
This neighborhood has deep roots as a Black community, and that history is present in everything, in the architecture, in who has fought to stay, in what the streets remember. To be a neighbor here means holding that. And within that history there’s also this extraordinary dailiness, a Caribbean bakery, a Korean grocery, a Yemeni spot, a Thai family running a restaurant that feels like home. All within five minutes on foot. That kind of proximity, cultures living alongside each other in the ordinary texture of a block, it has a depth and a tension to it. Things pressing against each other without resolving. That’s closer to what I’m after.
Are there local people, places or traditions you return to again and again?
Nur Jahan Fabrics right on Fulton, where the bolts are piled floor to ceiling and the accumulation of it feels familiar in my bones. Beds Thai – yes really – a Thai restaurant in Bed-Stuy that makes me feel seen in the most unexpected way. Buna at the hardware store who gives the best recommendations. Trini Girl Roti when I need to feel fed in every sense. And our mahjong meetup, a group of friends scattered across this neighborhood who find each other regularly, the kind of ritual that keeps you tethered. I find my way to things through conversation, through stumbling, through asking for help and being willing to receive it. Reciprocity is a practice. The neighborhood offers that if you’re paying attention.
What does this community give you that you couldn’t get somewhere else?
The feeling of never being alone, even when I’m working by myself. From morning to evening, even at 3 a.m., there is a porousness to having my studio here that is unlike anywhere else I’ve known. It brings me back to my time doing ethnographic research in rural Thailand, where kin were just around, sitting, dancing, weaving, dyeing, eating. Life and making were not separate things. Making has always been communal, across every material and every culture I come from. Knowledge passed through proximity and repetition, through watching and being watched, through hands working near other hands. I carry that understanding into the studio. Bed-Stuy holds a version of that for me. It’s a place that understands something about collective memory, about what gets passed down and what it costs to keep it alive.
How do the sights, sounds and rhythms of your neighborhood affect your process?
Sounds and smells transport us. That’s not poetic license, it’s neuroscience – the olfactory system is the only sense with a direct line to memory and emotion, no relay. So when I’m walking through this neighborhood and something catches, a smell coming from a window, the clamor of folks getting on the bus, a basketball bouncing, the rhythm of a particular block, I’m being pulled into multiple times at once. That’s actually what I’m trying to make in the studio. Different times pressing against each other without resolving. [Chinese-American anthropologist] Anna Tsing calls it temporal polyphony. I think about it every time I turn a corner in this neighborhood.
Do you think of your work as connected to a specific place?
My mother once told me that home is not a place, it’s a feeling. As a child I was confused, looking for somewhere to point to. Now I understand she was describing exactly what my body has always had to do: hold across distance and time, carry many places at once without resolving them into one. My family’s history is one of crossings, of people moving across oceans and languages, carrying what they could. The work doesn’t try to map that. It holds it as a constellation.
My family’s restaurant kitchen. The salt flats of Phetchaburi province where my ancestors farmed. The fishing communities my lineage moves through. The jungles and junkyards of Indonesia. The weaving villages in northern and northeastern Thailand where I spent months working alongside elders. And yes, this studio, this block. These are not a sequence. They are points of light that belong to the same sky.
How does your own background and your neighborhood’s history intersect in your art?
I keep coming back to [writer and philosopher Édouard] Glissant’s idea of opacity, the right to remain unresolved, illegible to systems that want to classify and contain. Bed-Stuy knows something about that. So does my family’s history. My lineage carries the memory of displacement, of labor that was never fully named, of knowledge that was passed body to body because there was no other way to keep it alive. History is pressed into lands and bodies. That’s not a figure of speech in my work, it’s almost literal. I press objects into clay before it fires. I knot things into fiber. I amalgamate objects collected from different places, times, registers. The compression is the point.
There is an invitation in the work and a refusal inside the invitation. The invitation might be color, abundance, density, softness. But you are met with precarity, with sharpness, with a sense that even if you wanted to fully inhabit and know these worlds I’m making, you can’t.
Has gentrification, displacement or growth affected your sense of place as an artist?
It makes me think about what it means to tend something. The kitchen, like the land, is a place that requires tending. So is a neighborhood. So is a community’s sense of itself. When that gets disrupted, by capital, by displacement, by the slow erasure of who was here first, what remains? What gets carried in the body even when the place is gone?
This is not abstract for me. Economic dispossession in Southeast Asia is part of why my parents ended up in the United States. The leaving was hastened. What looks like arrival was also a kind of displacement. I carry that when I walk through a neighborhood that knows what it means to be pushed.
There is a Thai concept, อดทน, that doesn’t translate cleanly into English. Endurance is the closest word but it flattens something. อดทน is about absorbing, continuing, being changed by what you carry and remaining anyway. That’s what I see in this neighborhood. That’s what I see in the people who built it and fight to stay. I don’t make work that answers these questions. I make work that lives in the friction.
What role do collaborations and relationships play in your practice?
Everything I know about making I learned in proximity to someone else. Growing up in the restaurant I learned about expression and care and precision through my hands, through watching, through being alongside my family who were nourishing others every day, even as it meant sore backs, cracked soles, tired eyes. My time working alongside weavers and village elders in Thailand wasn’t research in the way that word usually implies. It was inheritance. A gift. An act of service, an offering. Being trusted with something that had been passed down for generations and choosing to carry it carefully. I was learning about rice, about hammock and mat making, about mending fishing nets, about the full material culture of how my people sustain themselves and each other. That’s why the work manifests as entanglement. Interdependence and interconnectedness are not themes I apply to the work, they are the structure of it.
Even now, on any given day, I might be sourcing shuttles from the Netherlands to make just the right statement about colonialism, texting Tommy and his dad about picking up some sugarcane on Canal Street, sitting with peers to resolve a creative problem, having folks in the studio for unhurried conversation, asking someone how to push a process or a material further. The studio can feel solitary but it never really is. The materials I work with have histories, they’ve been in other hands. They hold stories and tenderness and strain. Some of them arrive already implicated. The blue and white porcelain you find in any home, commodified beyond recognition, that pattern traveling from Chinese porcelain through Dutch copying through mass manufacture until it became just a thing people own. And it arrives broken. I work with it because it’s already in relation to me whether either of us chose it.
How do community conversations or local issues enter your studio practice?
During the resurgence of anti-Asian hate in the pandemic I worked with the NYC Commission on Human Rights on a public art campaign called “I Still Believe in Our City.” Defiant Asian American faces across over 500 locations in the city, on buildings, bus stops, kiosks, subway screens, subway stations. “I am not your scapegoat.” ”I did not make you sick.” ”We belong here.” The work was created in conversation with community groups operating across all five boroughs. That’s where it came from. That’s what made it undeniable, so much so it ended up on the cover of Time and at rallies and protests around the world. The same scrappy proliferative logic that operates in the studio practice operated there. You put the thing everywhere. You don’t ask permission for every surface. You let it accumulate until it’s impossible to ignore. That’s jungle logic at city scale. Community and local issues don’t enter the studio as interruptions. The studio has always been porous. The work has always been one of the ways I know how to say what needs to be said.
How do you think about unruliness — the messiness in your work?
I’m drawn to invasive species, but not for the reason people expect. These plants resisted farming and cultivation, which meant the colonial project couldn’t profit from them and largely ignored them. That’s precisely what made them sustaining to the communities who knew them. They survived in the gaps. And then they arrive here and get called invasive, the same logic applied to them that gets applied to immigrants.
That’s not just an aesthetic preference. Colonial logic depends on clean categories, on what belongs where, on what counts as native. My work tries to be genuinely unruly in that sense. Not chaotic, purposeful in its refusal to be tidied. I call it jungle logic. Things proliferate in the gaps where colonialism, imperialism and capitalism left them alone. Refusing to be tamed.
You can see it in “A World Still Trying to Bloom” [a 2026 sculpture by Phingbodhipakkiya]. Black pepper, galangal, opium poppy, plants carried from their homelands in the holds of other people’s ships, grow there entwined with those that were never tameable. Mushrooms that know how to fruit in the dark, lotus roots that ask nothing of the water but its depth, the pomegranate split to the heart, seeding the ground with what it could no longer contain. The lilies are the only ones fully in bloom, proof that arrival is possible, outnumbered by all the trying. Everything else is the reaching, the rupture and the rot, the slow subterranean pressure that becomes, in time, a flower. The whole thing mid-collapse and mid-arrival, ruin and wilderness grown so far into each other the seam has disappeared. Not a promise. Not a restoration. Only us, carrying everything we carry, still reaching for the light. Still trying.
The post The Studio Visit: Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya appeared first on Epicenter NYC.
