Bangkok is the lively creative and cultural capital of the colorful Thailand. But does the art and museum scene of the town actually reflect the colorfulness of its country?
With its 8.2 million inhabitants on 1,569 square km, uncountable skyscrapers, busy markets and smelly restaurants, Bangkok is working on its role in the South Eastern artistic scene. The local environment appears undoubtedly diverse, as its numerous and varied districts.
The city hosts international artists, festivals and creative events, while building a stable inner and outer network. At the same time, museums both devote to new contemporary research and exhibit sublime and very strange collections.
Leader of the more traditional path is probably the Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre (BACC), located two steps away from Siam Square. Its look is consistent with the Western institutional directions, featuring white curving space and spiral walkways with a Guggenheim effect. The space exhibits both national and international projects, artists and designers, performance and musical events. It is essentially a polyhedral space and, in a city that’s a huge open sky market like Bangkok, the first two floors of the building offer inevitably also food and shops, among galleries. At the top floor curators propose rotating exhibitions. In February and March 2017, an interesting and pretty significant project displays the blacks and whites of the Brazilian artist Sebastião Salgado. A minimalistic set up is able to perfectly fit a curvilinear space with portraits of manual laborers, faces, hands, details, mob scenes and spaces, shooted from the 80s on.
