Is Bangkok CityCity Thailand’s Boldest Contemporary Art Space?

A makeshift house submerged in an aquarium. The walls made of canvas, advertisement banners screaming “for sale” in large, bold, red Thai letters. Seated viewers peer into the submerged house, where bleeding ripples carry the breath of oxygen through water. Mounted atop used materials, the aquarium hums in the stark, almost clinical albeit open-air white cube of Bangkok CityCity. Dilapidated wood and propped up window screens permeate Pratchaya Phinthong’s A Solo Project (2025) at the gallery, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

Founded in 2015 by Akapol Sudasna and Supamas Phahulo, the gallery has long served as a space for experimentation for emergent practitioners. What began as a name from Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s music video excerpt in the 2015 film Painting with history in a room filled with funny names, Bangkok CityCity, is now a ten-year veteran of artistic championing. Following the 2014 coup, exhibitions and projects churn out like mighty fine dust against the dying light of the city. From Ghost:2561 (2018) – the inaugural triennial video and performance art series curated by Korakrit Arunanondchai – to Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s Museum of Kirati (2018), the gallery has housed a rich artistic discourse, which it continues to foster today.

To understand the role of galleries in Thailand and the significance of contemporary art spaces, like Bangkok CityCity, one must understand Thailand’s historical relationship with cultural institutions. The institutionalisation of museums in the country was a diplomatic defense against colonial claims and justifications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such spaces were vital to the abetting of national narratives and the hallmark – and by hallmark, it is that of the West’s – of a centralised governance.

A space known as the “gallery” in Thailand is, therefore, strikingly different in the Thailand that was and the Thailand that is. Imagine a space historically politicised and valorised for national integrity now serving and repurposing itself as a room for further realisation of what national integrity entails – in a way, that is a gallery, in the context of Thailand. And so, what Bangkok CityCity was able to achieve in the span of a decade is unsurmountably groundbreaking when considering its trajectory in parallel to the everbifurcating and everemulsifying contemplation of the role of arts and culture in Thailand.

Following Thailand’s first general election in 2019, and calls for constitutional reform in 2021, Bangkok CityCity exhibited history-enthusiast Nawin Nuthong’s A Room, Where They Are Coevals [Precise at a Dig Site Door] (2021) and The Immortals Are Quite Busy These Days (2021). The artist’s explorations ranged from archaeological gaming to the subsidisation of innovation and the renovation of history – points of departure which were once again reflected in his Fountain Foundation (2025). Nuthong was timely, if not painstakingly genuine, to the cadence of Thailand and current global affairs. Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s I a Pixel, We the People (2025) furthered and cemented the amalgamation of expression in spite of state oppression in the realm of that which is data and digital.

A decade with Bangkok CityCity, in retrospect, has observed the dovetailing of Thailand’s newly minted intimacy with art – free from the strings attached to its initial colonial justification. Perhaps Phinthong’s makeshift house – engulfed by water and made wobbly by swollen wood – serves as an allegory of artistic thought, buoyed by dogged persistence, still standing despite, rather than because of, the country’s history with creative expression and dialogue.



Feature image: Installation view: Pratchaya Phinthong, A Solo Project, 2025, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY, Bangkok. Photo: Tanatchai Bandasak. Courtesy of the artist and BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY