Galeri Sasha is pleased to present In Plain Sight, a two-person exhibition of new paintings by Ong Pei Yee (b. 1999, Malaysia) and Pik Chaichit (b. 2002, Thailand). Both artists begin with familiar images, but converse with them in very different ways. Across the paintings, ordinary objects, gestures and fragments of experience are given greater weight through close observation, cropping and isolation.
Ong Pei Yee’s paintings emerge from lived experience and the accumulation of habit. Often composed from a first-person perspective, they place the viewer within moments of rest, movement, eating, waiting and looking. A hand reaches into a refrigerator; a takeaway meal sits half-finished; a padlock remains hanging long after it has ceased to be useful. These details capture how life is actually lived and experienced: through routine, convenience, idleness, repetition and things left undone. Her recent work continues an interest in passive states and moments when very little appears to be happening. For Pei Yee, these situations are not insignificant. They form part of the texture of a life, carrying memory through ordinary habits, objects and gestures.
Pik Chaichit, by contrast, isolates familiar objects, animals and bodily forms from the situations around them. A dog is cropped almost beyond recognition; a cap appears alone; a broken object is shown without explanation; two ears of corn fill the canvas. The subjects themselves are easy to recognise, but the situations around them remain unclear. This uncertainty is central to Pik’s work. The paintings show enough for us to identify what we are looking at, but not enough to explain why it is there, what has happened, or what significance it might hold.
Seen together, Pei Yee and Pik offer two different ways of looking at the familiar. Pei Yee stays close to experience, allowing meaning to emerge through habit, passivity, memory and the small details that shape daily life. Pik removes those same kinds of details from their usual context, leaving the viewer with images that are clear in form but uncertain in meaning. In Plain Sight brings these approaches together through a shared attention to what is easily overlooked.
Ong Pei Yee (b. 1999, Selangor, Malaysia) is a Malaysian painter whose practice centres on memory, habit and the everyday traces of lived experience. She graduated from Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, and received the Bronze Prize in the Emerging Artist Category at the UOB Painting of the Year in 2022.
Pik Chaichit (b. 2002, Thailand) is a Thai painter whose work explores perception, ambiguity and the construction of images. He graduated from the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, majoring in Painting. His recent solo exhibition, Unseen, was presented at Richard Koh Fine Art, Bangkok, in 2026.