A pale green panel of frosted glass carries three lines in tiny lettering: “She was thinking about the scene of one of the videos. They arrived at a plaza, theaters on all sides. Fountain in the middle. All lights were out.” Below, a video projection of a river runs on loop, its shimmering ripples interrupted by glitch-like halts. What lingers in Seaside Highway (2025) is not the imagery or half-told narrative but its hypnotizing melancholy—the emotional register that hums through Pam Virada’s practice. 

Born in 1993 in Bangkok, Virada is a Thai Chinese multidisciplinary artist whose work circles the elusiveness of memory, both personal and diasporic. Her family relocated from southern China to Thailand in the mid-20th century; by her generation, the cultural inheritance had thinned to something more felt than known. Rather than narrate her origins directly, Virada works through intimate attunements—oblique gestures, ambient cues, objects steeped in ambiguous meaning. In Descendant (autumn notes) (2025), she strings together necklaces she had worn since childhood, suspending the chain from the ceiling down toward a pallet of tea glasses on the floor. Tea recurs across her practice: she frequently stages tea drinking gatherings as performance, or invites audiences to leave emptied cups within her installations, channeling warmth, ease, and fleeting forms of human connection.