face lift twenty: Tunlaya Dunnvatanachit

"I want to expand my work both in mediums and subjects in the future. I hope to maintain my commercial side and still being able to experiment and evolve."

—Tuna Dunn

Since we’re moving to Thailand soon, I’ve decided to include a Thai artist in the project each week. It feels like a good way to start getting to know my future home—not just through food or language, but through the quiet, radical intimacy of art. Artists show you what a culture feels like beneath the surface. And if this week’s pick is any indication, Thailand feels beautifully tender.

Tuna Dunn (Tunlaya Dunnvatanachit) is a Bangkok-based illustrator whose work focuses on the small, often wordless moments that shape human connection. Her comics drift between heartbreak and healing, friendship and distance, always in muted colors and open spaces that feel as quiet as memory. She doesn’t draw to make noise—she draws to make you feel less alone.

What I love most about her work is that it doesn’t demand. It doesn’t posture. It simply offers. It’s deeply personal and completely universal at the same time—the kind of art that feels like a conversation you were already having in your head, except now it’s in pictures. Her stories feel like small truths you remember more than read.

And in a world full of loud, fast, synthetic everything, that kind of softness matters.

Help Digital 2017

Tuna Dunn works digitally, using tools like Photoshop and Procreate to craft her quiet visual worlds. But she doesn’t use digital tools for polish—she uses them for softness, flow, and precision in emotion. Her comics often reject traditional panel structures, favoring open space and fluid movement over rigid boxes and punchlines. The result is less like reading and more like drifting—through a feeling, a memory, or a moment that never quite ended.

What sets her apart is her ability to communicate so much with so little. A glance, a pause, a shape left incomplete—her work invites you to linger in ambiguity. It’s deeply narrative, but the narrative is mood, not motion. Her stories rarely follow strict arcs; instead, they explore tension, vulnerability, and longing with remarkable restraint. And that restraint is where the emotional weight lands hardest.

Tuna also publishes in both Thai and English, making her stories accessible across borders. There’s something special about that quiet kind of generosity—sharing a deeply personal visual language in a way that welcomes others in. Her art doesn’t just illustrate connection; it enacts it.

Tunlaya Dunnvatanachit, Running Thoughts, 2021

Tuna Dunn’s illustrations feel like quiet in a noisy room. Even when shared digitally, even when made with tools that live on a screen, they carry a hush. Her characters rarely shout. They glance, they lean, they hold tension in the space between gestures. The backgrounds hum with stillness. It’s the kind of emotional restraint that says more than spectacle ever could.

In a world of scroll-triggered over-stimulation, where content constantly begs for attention, her work offers stillness. A pause. A small, human moment. That’s a radical act—especially online.

Even though her tools might overlap with those used in AI-generated images, the difference is stark. Tuna’s art doesn’t flood you with symbols—it listens. It doesn’t try to mimic emotion; it channels it, carefully and on purpose. There’s nothing automated about a feeling that takes its time.

Her recent shift to working with acrylic on canvas only deepens that sense of intentionality. Each piece, whether digital or physical, is a whisper in a world trained to shout. In that way, Tuna’s art reminds us that technology isn’t the enemy—it’s how we use it. And she uses it to connect, not to overwhelm.

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