Their group show - "Little More Sweet, Not too Sour" at the 100 Tonson Gallery - weaves a path between sugary femininity and tart feminism, not with their customary sculptures and installations but with prints and drawings, and the result is an intriguing, if quieter, perspective on their favoured subject - woman's evolution.

In Pinaree's depictions of the female torso in drawings in candle wax on charcoal paper and in lithographs and "collographs" (another printing technique), admirable breasts transform into venerable stupas, then morph again into bendable bowls.

"Breasts in art were once a symbol of maternity and fertility," says the 45-year-old mother of a young teen. "But here that's changed to a vessel that appears hollow. My previous work was more on a personal level. Now I'm more open, like the vessel, not confined to a particular frame."

Pinaree happily alternates between two- and three-dimensional media. She enjoys working on charcoal paper, despite the practical challenges it presents, because the resulting effects are so beautiful.

Its value as a medium, she says, "is about vulnerability and how things can't be sustained forever. To me, art is more about process than product.

"When using candle wax on charcoal paper, I have to be cautious at every step because of the burning flame. I'm not the sort that always goes to the temple, but a meticulous process like this does offer a form of self-healing approach."

Pinaree's 1996 installation "Confident Bodies" involved an array of rather scary female torsos sculpted from saa bush fibre. In 1999's "Womanly Bodies", 25 rhythmic sculptures were stitched together from the same coarse material.

Two years later she softened her view for "Noon Nom" - hundreds of puffy, oversized organza cushions in the form of breasts. The Thai title of the collection means "rest on a breast", and that's what people did, getting a little nurturing as well as a nap. Two years ago she served visitors to her Jim Thompson House show plates of rice moulded in the shape of a breast.

The evolution, Pinaree points out, was in getting the viewer directly involved with the form.

Araya has won praise overseas for her videos about consoling the bereaved and communing with the deceased, but in this show we see her early intaglio prints and etchings, all dark, gothic spectres of loss and despair.

Grieving for her own parents and grandparents, she did a pair of intaglio prints in 1990 that are on view at the current show. "When We Were Young" and "The Parting II" bear ghostly figures against black backgrounds.

In "Lao Duang Duan Goes Astray", from 1992, Araya repeats handwritten lyrics to a classical song composed a century earlier by His Royal Highness Prince Benbadhanabongse. It's about politics curtailing the heartbroken prince's love for a Chiang Mai princess.

French-American Bourgeois' huge, evocative sculptures have filled vast rooms, including the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall and the Arsenale at last year's Venice Biennale. The Tonson Gallery presents its own three prints, a 2004 set called "The Reticent Child".

One shows a child in the womb, another a child being born, the third a pregnant woman inside a breast. The narrative could be taken as linear or circular.

Bourgeois, still busily creative at age 95, has plumbed the psyche in her drawings and sculptures, producing work that's universal and deeply personal at the same time. There are glimpses of a painful childhood.

Kusama is still hallucinatory even without her rooms full of polka-dots, though they bob into view in the Tonson show as well, alongside the Japanese artist's distinctive fauna and flora, pumpkins in particular looming large.

Her parents had a pumpkin patch in the town of Matsumoto, so it's natural that, when Kusama began suffering mental delusions in childhood, these would appear among the dots, netting and flowers she saw in hallucinations, all subsequently turned into paintings and sculpture.

Kusama, now 77 and for a long time living by choice at a psychiatric hospital, was among the pioneers of vast, three-dimensional installations, happenings and soft sculpture.

Viewers have found in her work aspects of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, pop and abstract expressionism - but her preferred category is "obsessive".

Khetsirin Pholdhampalit

The Nation