We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nichakorn (Minnie) Masunthasuwan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Nichakorn (Minnie), thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?
I have been drawing and creating stories in my head since I was a child. Growing up, I often felt as though I had a shifting face, floating adrift among cultures and identities, feeling as though the world was transparently passing by me, while I carried only a vague sense of self. Having always struggled with language and speaking, drawing and painting became a safe space for me to explore my identity and build a personal library of digestible shapes, characters, and dialogues. Through drawing, I followed the flow of my instincts in form and color, seeking to understand the world intuitively rather than logically.
I have always loved beautiful pictures that carry a story and bring a world to life. Yet I never thought of art as a kind of service, something people need, like supermarket goods or other necessities, even though, when we look closely, we can see that art surrounds us in almost everything we do. Because art had always existed for me as something purely personal and therapeutic, I often found it difficult to create work that felt important or “correct” enough to exist in the world.
As a child, you don’t realize that there are adult hands and minds behind the pieces of media that inspire and influence the way you see the world, storybooks, films, animations, and even small things like clay figurines and album covers. When I eventually understood that it’s a job that real people do, I thought simply that these people were so cool. From there, I aspired to create art that was uniquely stylistic and my own, building emotionally driven worlds and landscapes that could hold a sense of otherness. It took me a long time to truly respect myself as a professional, to find an identity I could be proud of, and to discover my creative voice.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am an illustrator and multimedia artist based between Bangkok and New York City. My practice centers on creating surreal small-worlds, ranging from illustrations for storybooks, poetry, and comics to ceramics and video animation. My work aims to evoke tenderness and remind audiences of nostalgia, childhood naivety, dreams, and memories, like personal essays that have been forgotten, overlooked, or left unfinished. I create artwork for existing stories, and I also write my own short stories, comics, poems, and scripts.
At the heart of my work is a desire to communicate softness, intimacy, and human connection. I want to use my creative power to foster a space where sensitivity and emotions can surface in a world that often feels too fast and individualistic. I am also deeply passionate about mental health, and I hope to create pieces of art that could uplift or give voice to those who feel trapped by their own voices, even in small ways. If I could choose, I want my work to feel like an aquarium of fleeting moments, tucked-away memories, and idiosyncratic thoughts and secrets.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I’d love to talk about my creative process and how it carries me from an initial idea to a finished work. As an illustrator, I often struggle to finish pieces, as I find the most fun in the stages of ideation, research, and experimentation, where each work naturally leads to new ideas. Although I work across a wide range of mediums and project types, I approach all my work in a very similar way. Allowing myself to follow intuition while developing a piece of art is deeply important to me because I think that if a piece of art is too controlled, the ways ideas drift, overlap, and respond to one another, that organicness dissipates. For that reason, I always make time and space for extended periods of sketching and idea formation.
I gather doodles, found fabric, create mood boards, and lists centered around the subject I am exploring, including music that carries a similar vibe, artists whose work resonates with the project, novels, and quotes or atmospheres from films. I keep everything I can, screenshots of works in progress, discarded sketches, words that don’t seem right anymore, and often return to reuse them later. Through scraps, mistakes, and unfinished fragments, much of my work emerges from repurposing nonsense, trying to evoke meaning out of things that may seem like gibberish. I love this cut-and-piece energy of drawing from all my found materials and discovering something new. Sometimes I think about a project while riding the train, taking walks, or eating, removing it from the studio and allowing it to shift over time, until the artwork begins to feel like its own animal, like a thing breathing and changing, as I try to nurture it with my hands.
I truly believe in the practice of making something exist before it can become good. From my own experience, I relate to the feeling many artists have when they become stuck in the pursuit of perfection, to the point where it feels impossible to begin anything at all. Starting with something small and manageable helps break that fear. For me, an artwork truly comes to life in the process rather than in its final outcome, and because of that, it truly matters who is making the work, at what time, and why. I also believe that people are constantly changing, and because of that, there is no true permanence or perfection in creation. Even imperfect or unsuccessful work can later become perspective, reference, or the starting point for a new idea.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
Even though my work often appears vague or abstract, sometimes to the point where people might look at it and ask, ‘What is this?’, I feel deeply honored when I hear from those who are moved or touched by the feelings my drawings or words are trying to convey. My goal is to create atmospheres that others can recognize as existing within themselves, even if those feelings remain ambiguous. While it may feel self-assured to believe that my work can reach others in this way, I truly cherish every small connection I have shared with people, both in person and online, not only through my own work but also through conversations about the media we love and experience together. For me, being an artist feels most rewarding when I can contribute to a community where art is seen, discussed, and experienced by people who recognize themselves in it.
I am not an artist who particularly enjoys maintaining a strong social media presence or cultivating an online persona. However, that is why I value art’s ability to bring even the most tucked-away individuals together, through recognition, through seeing something and feeling that it speaks to you, without boundaries or discrimination, and with open-mindedness. In a world that often feels saturated with inauthenticity, I believe that creating and talking about art has never been more important. Because of this, I feel incredibly grateful to be able to do what I do and to sustain myself through my creative practice.
Looking ahead, my personal goal as an artist is to collaborate more and to continue bringing others’ stories to life. I hope to use my practice to raise awareness, amplify underrepresented voices, and encourage hands-on and experimental approaches to art-making. I am especially interested in fostering literacy and sharing works that have shaped me: films, books, videos, and artworks from eras that now feel tucked away in internet history.
If you exist in today’s world, there is most definitely something you could say, even if it feels embarrassing, inconsistent, or confusing, and even if you are still working through those ideas. With time, care, and dedication, you will find the words and forms to speak about what lives inside you. And if you can’t convince anyone else, convince yourself first. If any readers feel drawn to share an artwork, a story, or collaborate in any way, I would love to connect!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nicha-m.com/#
- Instagram: @nicha.m_ Link:https://www.instagram.com/nicha.m_/?hl=en
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nichakorn-masunthasuwan-61599b335
- Other: Email:
