The Opium Smoking White Elephant - The Winged Flower Guardian

Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 30 × 30 cm with a 1 cm white border
Year: 2025 edition
Edition: 1 + 1 AP

This work from the Sacred Mushrooms and Flowers series depicts a central female figure seated in a pose reminiscent of ritual icons or temple representations. Surrounded by lush vegetation and a cosmic backdrop, she appears in a liminal space between nature and myth. The white wings opening behind her lend her an almost otherworldly presence and allude to spiritual guardian beings, such as those commonly found in Thai folklore and animism.

The floral headdress, from which blossoms burst forth, connects her directly to the plant world. The blossoms are not merely decorative, but rather a living expression of those spiritual forces that animate forests, mushrooms, and flowers in Southeast Asian tradition. The clear, unprotected depiction of the body is not understood here as nudity in a profane sense, but as an archaic state of purity and origin—a body in harmony with nature, with ritual, and with cosmic order.

The AI ​​condenses this symbolism into a hallucinatory, dreamlike scene in which golden ornaments, blossoms, and starry spaces merge into a single energetic structure. For the opium-smoking white elephant, this is a visual manifestation of that second reality which exists alongside Buddhism in Thailand: the world of spirits, nature beings, and sacred places—combined with an expressive visual language that surprisingly recalls the raw intuition of Western Art Brut.