Ripples across a river’s surface. Bat wings fluttering in a cave. A single weed swaying to a barely perceptible rhythm. All these moments constitute what the Bangkok-based artist Jeanne Penjan Lassus terms the “seedlings” that she pockets while creating moving images.

“Whenever an opportunity arises to showcase my works, I always intuitively reach for my bag of seedlings and assess which ones will be appropriate or exciting to sow within that specific context,” she says as we sip coffees in a small café tucked in one of the sprawling alleys near the Siam BTS Skytrain station. While her practice veers heavily towards film and video installation, Jeanne describes art as an expansive umbrella rather than a fixed discipline: “Working as an artist has allowed me to move fluidly between roles—researcher, writer, experimenter—without the pressure of mastery or perfection. This openness legitimises curiosity, hybridity, and amateurship, enabling me to approach ideas from unexpected angles and to embrace freedom as a core condition of my artistic practice.”

Jeanne’s screen-based aesthetics aptly embodies this non-linear, boundary-crossing approach to art. Her video installations occupy and transcend physical sites into a subversive realm, where our holistic senses can be invoked as our bodies plunge into subconscious depths with the hope of arising with new perspectives. To Jeanne, space is not a neutral container but a central catalyst. Unlike cinema’s linear format, her practice treats moving images as discrete “islands” placed within a space, their meanings constructed through viewers’ physical movement and encounters. Jeanne’s installations are thus continuously edited and re-edited through spatial arrangement, with individual videos functioning as brief, resonant moments that tug at our core memories.

• Tags: Dương Mạnh Hùng, Issue 43, Jeanne Penjan Lassus, Thailand