Apichaya Wanthiang
Photo credit: Per Christian Brown
In residence: August - November 2026
Apichaya (Piya) Wanthiang (TH/BE) is an artist based in Oslo. She holds a BA from Sint-Lukas, Brussels, and an MA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB). Working primarily with painting and installations that incorporate light, sound, and text, Piya constructs environments to explore how spaces influence perception, behaviour, and interaction. Her work engages the audience’s body directly, activating somatic knowledge through multiple senses in an effort to balance the dominance of sight and cognition.
Piya has exhibited widely in Norway, with solo exhibitions at the Munch Museum (Oslo), Kristiansand Kunsthall, and Storage (Bangkok). She has taught as Assistant Professor at both Trondheim Academy of Fine Art and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD) in Bergen, and has served on the boards of LNM (Norwegian Painters Association) and UKS (The Young Artists’ Society).
During her residency at Artica Svalbard, Piya will investigate how changing light conditions in the Arctic affect the human body and rhythms of daily life. Having grown up in rural Northeast Thailand, where work and rest closely follow natural light, she is interested in how people in Svalbard adapt to the long periods of light and darkness. Through video, photography, and writing, she will observe and document the presence and absence of light, exploring how local practices, sensory experience, and environment intertwine.