IT WAS HARD TO GET HERE reads a painted vinyl and plywood bench created by Finnegan Shannon and situated past the entryway of Dib Bangkok. It provides an abbreviated backstory behind a new museum that opened in the Thai capital in late December—the first of its kind in the city and the country. Stability is something the Thai art scene has lacked, and the museum’s launch marks a significant structural shift. “For the general arts scene here, the ecosystem is fast developing,” Miwako Tezuka, director of the museum, told Observer. “What we need is constancy.”
Located in a converted industrial warehouse designed by WHY Architecture (the same firm behind the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the museum takes its name from the Thai word “dib,” meaning “raw” or “natural, authentic state.” The institution’s holdings are comprised of the private art collection of Thai businessman Petch Osathanugrah, amassed over the course of three decades before his death in 2023. It comprises around 1,000 works by some 200 artists, more or less equally divided between Asian and non-Asian origins. “There was no institution presenting a space that allows local artists and global artists to have equal ground [in] conversation,” Tezuka added, contextualizing the importance of the museum.
The debut exhibition, “(In)visible Presence” (on view through August 3, 2026), is a meditation on memory curated by Ariana Chaivaranon. “It’s so important for local artists to see how they’re in dialogue with something that’s so much bigger than the nation or what’s going on right now in Thailand,” she told Observer. “These artists are all deeply intertwined with an international conversation. And yet, so often in Thailand, we only have a conversation internally, which is partly because of the collections that have been on display.” The mise-en-scène at Dib Bangkok reflects that these practices developed in different geographical regions, but Chaivaranon insisted that “visitors can actually see that they have been in dialogue for decades.”
She further emphasized how crucial the experiential aspect of museum-going is as a cornerstone of art education, and how Dib Bangkok is filling an absence in the city’s scene. In previous decades, “for many of these [Thai] artists, they were getting their knowledge of international work from slides, from books, from magazines, and they didn’t have a chance to see international art of their time. Dib is offering a site where the artists can now see these works in person. When you see it in person… it takes on a whole new dimension that is inaccessible through just digital media, even.” She cited as a key example the Anselm Kiefer work on view, Die verlorene Buchstabe, an installation unfurling from a Heidelberg letterpress sprouting tall resin sunflowers. “The sunflowers gently move with the air, right? That’s something you couldn’t get online—and something that I’m really excited for young artists now to be able to come here and be inspired by.”
Dib Bangkok’s 11 indoor galleries are spaced over three levels. The ground floor hosts Marco Fusinato’s work Constellations, a site-specific commission in which visitors are invited to whack a white wall with a Brooklyn Whopper Model CS38 Cold Steel baseball bat, whose sound is amplified at 120 decibels: a symbolic blow to the pristine museum space. This is followed by works from Jean-Luc Moulène and Ugo Rondinone; nearby, in the cone-shaped Chapel gallery, is Incubate, Subodh Gupta’s 2010 installation of stainless steel lunch tins (dabbas) overhung by chandeliers. (Recent sexual assault allegations did not prevent him from being featured.) Jannis Kounellis’s 1998 untitled work, comprised of four steel panels, I-beams and rolled second-hand garments—impecunious items he first used because he could not afford to buy new canvases—works well in conversation with Thai artists shown later in the exhibition, who also funneled principles of Arte Povera in their work: frugality, material simplicity.
On the second level, visitors encounter an iron bed by Rebecca Horn, Jinjoon Lee’s two-channel video installation and 22 folios on music paper by Louise Bourgeois. These pieces are paired with work by Thai artists, including gelatin silver prints by Surat Osathanugrah—father of the collector—which feature a modest depiction of day-to-day Thai life. Also on view are Navin Rawanchaikul’s tiers of photos of elders encased in salvaged medicine bottles (1994) and Somboon Hormtientong’s 1995 installation of wrapped vihara columns laid flat amongst libation vessels and glassware. These artists sanctify the rites that shape Thai lifestyles but refresh the perspective on tradition.
Under skylights on the top floor, the work of Montien Boonma is the star (he’s arguably the star of the whole museum). The Thai artist studied in Europe in the 1980s, and his sensitive, thoughtful work fosters a crossover between Arte Povera ideas and Thai spirituality. Lotus Sound piece (1999-2000, remade from a smaller 1992 version) stacks 500 terra-cotta bells around a gilded lotus flower, celebrating negative space, as does Arokayasala: Temple of the Mind (1996), with its herbal medicine drawers encircling aluminum lungs coated in aromatic herbal pastes. His 1998-99 installation Zodiac Houses models, at a modest scale, six existing German structures on stilts: visitors can take off their shoes, mount the platform and stand under their hollow structures, scented with cinnabar.
Outdoor works create a compelling complement to the galleries. Alicja Kwade’s Pars pro Toto (2020), an installation of 11 monumental stone globes ranging from 70-250 cm in diameter, speckle the courtyard like an outsized game of boules or errant marbles; Pinaree Sanpitak’s Breast Stupa Topiary (2013), a series of stainless-steel forms, dots the upper terrace. As is his signature, James Turrell’s 1988 Straight Up installation frames the sky above; the museum hosts dedicated sunrise and sunset programs for visitors. Sho Shibuya’s 85-meter-long print on vinyl, MEMORY, was specially commissioned by the museum, hugely enlarging the Sunrise from a Small Window series, in which the artist painted the sensuous colors of daybreak over the front page of the New York Times.
There is an emphasis on interactive and participatory works, so visitors can play. Surasi Kusolwong’s installation featuring an overturned and ceiling-suspended 1965 Volkswagen Beetle functions like a cradle in which visitors can sit and watch a video; the installation also includes TAO BIN vending machines, from which one can buy sour cream Pringles, salted cocktail nuts, Pepsi or Nescafé. “There are some works that are fragile, very sensitive, but we don’t want to make our exhibition precious,” Tezuka noted. The museum very much isn’t “a top-down institution where everything is didactically explained. … We want to make sure that we offer [visitors] the opportunity to educate themselves, to have their own creative agency and be their own active viewers.”
The first few shows will showcase the collection, and some galleries will rotate out more frequently than others (the display of Montien Boonma works will remain on the longest because these works haven’t previously been seen in context with each other). As for the way the collection will grow in the future, Chaivaranon confirmed that the institution is “continuing to acquire work, and I would say our strategy has a few different aspects, but one is to be quite deep. It’s not just one work from the big names.” Tezuka added that the “curatorial team is continuing to do the collection research to identify which are the gaps in the collection, whether that be cultural representation or different mediums that artists globally are using or experimenting with… How can we strategically fill in those gaps, while at the same time creating opportunities for newly discovered artists to present their works?”
Beyond the museum walls, Tezuka spoke about a “collective energy” brewing in the city’s art scene, citing the publicly funded art space BACC, the experimental programming at Bangkok Kunsthalle and the art destination of the Khao Yai Art Forest several hours outside the city. On the horizon, there will be deCentral, a space focusing on regional creative voices, and the Bangkok Biennale, which began in 2018, will return in fall 2026. According to Tezuka, “every organization is approaching art from a completely different way, bringing different perspectives.” The scene is most definitely one to watch.
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Sarah Moroz
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