La Inthonkaew
La was born in a small village bordering the jungle in central Thailand in 1980 or 1981. She is Thai, but some of her ancestors also came from Burma, Laos and China. Her father was a local shaman; her uncle was a locally venerated Buddhist monk famous for his miraculous powers; the women in her family were traditionally midwives.
She went to school for only four years, commuting from the family farm to the center of the village on the back of her favorite water buffalo - and almost always escaped before the end of her classes by jumping out of a classroom window, because she was bored. After the premature death of her father, the family disintegrated and, at the age of eleven, La found herself alone with two small brothers to take care of. She had to become a hunter and gatherer in order to survive for the next two years.
Later, La went through a number of menial jobs working e.g. as a construction laborer, cook, cleaning lady, masseuse and a beach parasol lender.
A mother of three, La gave birth to her first child when she was fifteen, and at the age of 33 she was already the grandmother of twins. While visiting with her family in Phuket in 2004, she was swept up by the tsunami, which
came close to killing her. At the same time, however, this traumatic experience fully opened the doors of her pictorial imagination.
To date, La’s work has been presented at ten individual and nine collective exhibitions in the Czech Republic, Poland and France.
Her paintings and drawings have also appeared in more than a dozen magazine articles in the Czech Republic, Great Britain and Italy.
In 2020, Manuel Anceau gave a lecture on La’s paintings as part of a series organized by Mrs. Lise Maurer at the Institut Protestant de Théologie in Paris, and in the same year Pavel Konečný additionally published a comprehensive selection of her drawings in his “Marginalie” edition.
In 2021, Revolver Revue published Ondřej Sekanina's book: “The Shamanic Rosary,” inspired by La’s stories about her childhood spent in the Thai countryside and which was illustrated by her paintings.
La’swork is included in a number of Czech, French and Polish private collections, including two of the most important Polish collections – those of Andrzej Kwasiborski and Leszek Macak. Also, in 2022, the Silesian Museum in Katowice purchased a large number of her works.
Ondřej Sekanina, 2024
