about the artist

Amy

Thai

Amy Thai (b.1992) is a sculptor working with stone, glass, and porcelain. Rooted in her Vietnamese-Australian heritage and shaped by an international practice spanning Australia, Europe and China, Thai has pursued mastery within the world’s most storied craft traditions. She trained in botanical art in Paris, the center of floral artistry, where she developed skills in creating ephemeral large-scale botanical sculptures. In Carrara, renowned since Roman times for its exceptional marble, she personally selects each marble block and works it by hand, allowing the stone’s unique veining, coloration, and character to guide her process. On the island of Murano in Venice, famed for its centuries-old glassmaking tradition, she collaborates closely with Barovier&Toso ARTE and master glassblowers to create imposing glass pieces that push the medium’s limits. Most recently, she has explored porcelain techniques in Jingdezhen, China’s ‘Porcelain Capital’, with over 1,700 years of ceramic history. Throughout her exploration of these materials, Thai draws consistent inspiration from botanical forms, exploring ephemeral and permanent aspects of the natural world.

RECOGNITION AND EXHIBITIONS

Amy Thai's works have been described by the New York Times as one of Australia's leading artists who is changing the floral landscape, she was interviewed by VOGUE Living Australia and she was the national winner of Australian Women's Small Business Champions (2022). She has been an artist-in-residence at Lapis Lazuli: artE, Venice (2023) and participated in the subsequent group exhibition 'H2O Venezia: Diari d'acqua / Water Diaries' (parallel to the 2024 Biennale di Venezia), in collaboration with Fondazione Barovier&Toso, with her work subsequently entering the Fondazione's collection. She was selected by Barovier&Toso ARTE from the Biennale 2024 exhibition and is now represented by the gallery. Her work was featured in the 2025 inaugural exhibition 'Glass Art in Dialogue / Arte del vetro in dialogo' by Barovier&Toso ARTE on Murano. Her works were also shown by Barovier&Toso ARTE in renowned architect Pierre-Yves Rochon project Villa Heritage at the Salone del Mobile in Milan 2025 and are now on view at the 2025 edition of the Art of the Treasure Hunt, ‘Gardens in my Dreams’.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUES

Philippe Malgouyres, ‘« Undercurrent » d’Amy Thai : dans la lenteur du flot’ / ‘”Undercurrent” by Amy Thai: In the Slowness of the Flow’ / ‘“Corrente sotterranea” di Amy Thai: nella lentezza del flusso’, in Mara Hofmann (ed.), H2O Venezia: Diari d’acqua / Water Diaries, exh. cat. SPUMA – Space for the Arts, Venice, 18 April – 24 Nov. 2024, Milan: Electa, 2024, pp. 62-68.

Mara Hofmann, Glass Art in Dialogue / Arte del vetro in dialogo, exh. cat. Palazzo Barovier&Toso, Venice, 13 February – 8 June 2025, Venice: Barovier&Toso ARTE, pp. 13-27.

Thai’s sculptures embody a quiet sensuality through soft curves and tactile surfaces, while also suggesting a meditative, spiritual dimension. She seeks not merely to carve marble but to liberate an inner essence from within. Fascinated by the interplay of movement and light on surface, many of her works appear to ripple or flow, as if marble could bend or breathe. Light plays an integral role – grazing or filling concavities, while shadows deepen the emotional resonance of her forms. For Thai, sculpting is both a physical and emotional act. Whether working with marble's resistance, glass's molten fluidity, or porcelain's delicate plasticity, her process becomes a direct translation of feeling into form. This embodied approach also extends into performance, where her direct interaction with the pieces – touching, turning, positioning – becomes part of their expressive vocabulary.

Thai's work stands at the intersection of ancient craft traditions and contemporary artistic inquiry. Her sculptures address fundamental questions about permanence and transience, hardness and softness, the constructed and the organic. Through her mastery of flowers, stone, glass, and ceramic, she creates works that invite physical engagement – pieces designed to be walked around, touched, and experienced from multiple angles. Her sculptures transform with the viewer's movement, while multi-element works can be physically rotated by hand to create new compositional arrangements. Her strategic use of surface textures captures shifting light and shadow throughout the day.

“… The beauty of Amy Thai’s work lies precisely in the truthfulness of her relationship with the materials she uses. She chooses the block in the quarry, as sculptors have done for time immemorial. She then feels the marble’s hardness in her very muscles and bones through the tool’s response, crystalline and rigid, upon each strike. Like so many questions put forth to the material, eliciting so many incisive responses. (…) A sculptor who loves and understands the material can choose to be guided by it, and renounce imposing his own will upon it. This is what we sense in these sculptures, which simultaneously express possibilities and limits. And, perhaps, not so much a dialogue as an intense relationship, in which silence, discretion and non-doing have a true place. (…) The fact that these sculptures are assembled to compose a new form, the one that is offered to our eyes, imbues them with a transitory, fleeting character. Despite their material, these sculptures are fragile, and their very mobility seems to place them in constant danger. Because movement is life which also encompasses its end. Marble, pulled from the bed where it lay for thousands of years, has regained a primitive life. It has metamorphosed into something undefined yet resolutely organic, with forms that are uncertain and precise at the same time. And it can move, not only in the light that caresses or grazes it, but like seaweed in the current, to the rhythm of its environment. Times flow and overlap. Unfathomable geological time, at the bottom of the ocean and in the bowels of the earth. The time of slow artistic creation. The transient and lasting time of our contemplation."

Philippe Malgouyres