THE CONCEPT OF homeland encompasses culture, history, and identity. It’s a site of personal memories and visions for the future. For Chomwan Weeraworawit, home and land are creative starting points. “I seek to examine our history and tradition,” she says, “and to use it to reimagine a new aesthetic future for Thailand through the lens of art, film, fashion, food, and design.” It wasn’t until she resettled in the land of her forebearers that this intention crystallized. In the clothing brand Philip Huang, founded with her husband, the company’s namesake, Weeraworawit’s abstract ideas about home came together in a collection of relaxed and desirable wardrobe essentials.

Then the couple learned Weeraworawit was pregnant with twins, and a temporary relocation to be near family in Bangkok was “the sensible thing to do.”

The daughter of a diplomat and an expat from birth, Weeraworawit spent her formative years living between Indonesia and the U.K. She grew up in the bubble of a “weird international utopia,” she says, “where there are no borders because everyone brings something different from their culture, and all cultures are respected.” She was shaped by the West, where she was schooled, and the East, where she returned on breaks, but Thailand has always been at the center of her endeavors. “I carried my culture and its ingredients everywhere I went; in that way you represent where you come from.” Inevitably, the farther she ventured from her homeland, the stronger her connection became.

In the recent past, with the death of the king and subsequent transfer of power, Thailand, a constitutional monarchy since the 1930s, has experienced unprecedented waves of social turbulence. Weeraworawit explains: “Underneath this layer of peace, fertility, and tropical bliss lies a lot of things we don’t discuss because, as a culture, Thailand has been molded to be this land of compromise and smiles.” The pandemic exposed inequalities, as it has in so many places, and has been driving a wave of youth-led protests demanding institutional reform. Linking the social component of the brand’s mission with its objective as a culture platform, Weeraworawit says that culture plays such an important role in her work because, “ultimately, what we’re all fighting for is room to be able to freely express ourselves.”

In her work on her brand and her consulting practice, Weeraworawit’s regular collaborators are internationally esteemed storytellers, artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Korakrit Arunanondchai, film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Michelin-starred chefs Gaggan Anand and Bo Songvisava. Whatever the medium, the themes of land and longing that interest Weeraworawit most are so local that they’re global. The specifics are different, but the issues are the same. Emotion rises in her voice as she says, “our concerns as human beings, our desires, our love for ‘other’ things — maybe they are the same all over the world. For me to be able to draw from my country, from the land, enables me to speak widely to people.”

As a translator of Thailand’s contemporary culture, Chomwan Weeraworawit shares insight into land, nature, wellness, and spirituality in her native country with the wider world. She was recently named co-curator of the third installment of the Bangkok Art Biennale, which begins in October 2022. The festival brings together artists from Thailand and abroad under the theme of Chaos : Calm, aptly echoing the energy of a country struggling with the notion of change. “Everything I’ve done draws from Thailand,” Weeraworawit says. “My purpose is to help further the creative landscape here.”