He started out painting movie advertisements on billboards. His early murals mixed traditional Thai Buddhist temple art with contemporary images, which was controversial. Nonetheless, he was commissioned in1988 to paint murals for Wat Buddhapadipa in London.The murals took four years to complete and were controversial because of the contemporary stylings. "I got complaints from everybody – from the [Thai] government, from monks and from other artists, saying that what I was doing was not Thai art," he was quoted as saying in 1998.