Soft Power, Hard Feelings: A Public Lecture by Belle Phromchanya
(The lecture will be in English only, without Thai translation)
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Saturday 17 May, 2025
13:30-15:00
Architecture Library, Faculty of Architecture
Chulalongkorn University
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Soft Power, Hard Feelings is a public lecture by Belle Phromchanya, a designer and visual researcher working across graphic design, writing, film, and collaborative formats. Drawing from her experience of living between Bangkok and the Netherlands, she shares how personal displacement, cultural distance, and emotional friction have shaped her practice.
The lecture explores how fiction and reality can be used together as a method of design—blurring truth and imagination to open new ways of seeing, feeling, and framing contemporary issues. Through selected projects, Belle reflects on how speculative approaches can hold space for contradiction, and how design can respond to lived experiences that don’t fit neatly into existing systems.
The lecture concludes with an introduction to "Soft Power, Hard Feelings — Fictional Tourism Workshop" for the CommDe Open Studio, which invites students to explore how tourism shapes national identity and perception. Rather than treating it as an industry, the workshop looks at tourism as a system of signs—where design constructs narratives of culture, desire, and belonging.
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About Belle Promchanya
Belle Phromchanya นวลขนิษฐ์ พรหมจรรยา (b. 1984, Bangkok) is an artist, designer, and cultural worker based in Rotterdam. Her practice explores the construction of biography and the ways personal and collective narratives are shaped, distorted, or erased. Working across film, installation, publishing, and curatorial projects, she examines the shifting boundaries of identity, digital legacies, and the politics of visibility. Often engaging with insider-outsider dynamics, her work reflects on transborder experiences and the negotiation of belonging within dominant cultural narratives.
Phromchanya is a tutor at Willem de Kooning Academy and co-founder of NON NATIVE NATIVE, a platform that engages with Asian representation within the Dutch and European cultural landscape. Through research, exhibitions, and public interventions, NNN connects contemporary creative practices with local diaspora narratives, fostering new modes of exchange and visibility. The platform also organises an alternative cultural fair that subverts conventional frameworks of Asian trade fairs, reimagining them as spaces for discourse and cross-cultural exchange.
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This event has limited seating.
Please reserve your spot in advance via the following link:
https://forms.gle/RURowHt13ZMYiYyc9
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This event is organized by the International Program in Communication Design (CommDe), Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University.
Cover image designed by Waterproof Exhibitions
Also check out other Arts events in Bangkok, Workshops in Bangkok, Exhibitions in Bangkok.
