IT WAS HARD TO GET HERE reads a painted vinyl and plywood bench created by Finnegan Shannon and located previous the entryway of Dib Bangkok. It offers an abbreviated backstory behind a brand new museum that opened within the Thai capital in late December—the primary of its sort within the metropolis and the nation. Stability is one thing the Thai artwork scene has lacked, and the museum’s launch marks a big structural shift. “For the final arts scene right here, the ecosystem is quick creating,” Miwako Tezuka, director of the museum, advised Observer. “What we want is fidelity.”
Positioned in a transformed industrial warehouse designed by WHY Structure (the identical agency behind the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork), the museum takes its identify from the Thai phrase “dib,” which means “uncooked” or “pure, genuine state.” The establishment’s holdings are comprised of the personal artwork assortment of Thai businessman Petch Osathanugrah, amassed over the course of three many years earlier than his loss of life in 2023. It includes round 1,000 works by some 200 artists, roughly equally divided between Asian and non-Asian origins. “There was no establishment presenting an area that enables native artists and world artists to have equal floor [in] dialog,” Tezuka added, contextualizing the significance of the museum.
The debut exhibition, “(In)seen Presence” (on view by way of August 3, 2026), is a meditation on reminiscence curated by Ariana Chaivaranon. “It’s so essential for native artists to see how they’re in dialogue with one thing that’s a lot larger than the nation or what’s occurring proper now in Thailand,” she advised Observer. “These artists are all deeply intertwined with a world dialog. And but, so usually in Thailand, we solely have a dialog internally, which is partly due to the collections which were on show.” The mise-en-scène at Dib Bangkok displays that these practices developed in numerous geographical areas, however Chaivaranon insisted that “guests can really see that they’ve been in dialogue for many years.”
She additional emphasised how essential the experiential side of museum-going is as a cornerstone of artwork schooling, and the way Dib Bangkok is filling an absence within the metropolis’s scene. In earlier many years, “for a lot of of those [Thai] artists, they had been getting their information of worldwide work from slides, from books, from magazines, and so they didn’t have an opportunity to see worldwide artwork of their time. Dib is providing a website the place the artists can now see these works in individual. Whenever you see it in individual… it takes on a complete new dimension that’s inaccessible by way of simply digital media, even.” She cited as a key instance the Anselm Kiefer work on view, Die verlorene Buchstabe, an set up unfurling from a Heidelberg letterpress sprouting tall resin sunflowers. “The sunflowers gently transfer with the air, proper? That’s one thing you couldn’t get on-line—and one thing that I’m actually excited for younger artists now to have the ability to come right here and be impressed by.”
Dib Bangkok’s 11 indoor galleries are spaced over three ranges. The bottom ground hosts Marco Fusinato’s work Constellations, a site-specific fee by which guests are invited to whack a white wall with a Brooklyn Whopper Mannequin CS38 Chilly Metal baseball bat, whose sound is amplified at 120 decibels: a symbolic blow to the pristine museum house. That is adopted by works from Jean-Luc Moulène and Ugo Rondinone; close by, within the cone-shaped Chapel gallery, is Incubate, Subodh Gupta’s 2010 set up of chrome steel lunch tins (dabbas) overhung by chandeliers. (Latest sexual assault allegations didn’t stop him from being featured.) Jannis Kounellis’s 1998 untitled work, comprised of 4 metal panels, I-beams and rolled second-hand clothes—impecunious gadgets he first used as a result of he couldn’t afford to purchase new canvases—works properly in dialog with Thai artists proven later within the exhibition, who additionally funneled ideas of Arte Povera of their work: frugality, materials simplicity.
On the second stage, guests encounter an iron mattress by Rebecca Horn, Jinjoon Lee’s two-channel video set up and 22 folios on music paper by Louise Bourgeois. These items are paired with work by Thai artists, together with gelatin silver prints by Surat Osathanugrah—father of the collector—which characteristic a modest depiction of day-to-day Thai life. Additionally on view are Navin Rawanchaikul’s tiers of pictures of elders encased in salvaged medication bottles (1994) and Somboon Hormtientong’s 1995 set up of wrapped vihara columns laid flat amongst libation vessels and glassware. These artists sanctify the rites that form Thai life however refresh the angle on custom.
Beneath skylights on the highest ground, the work of Montien Boonma is the star (he’s arguably the star of the entire museum). The Thai artist studied in Europe within the Nineteen Eighties, and his delicate, considerate work fosters a crossover between Arte Povera concepts and Thai spirituality. Lotus Sound piece (1999-2000, remade from a smaller 1992 model) stacks 500 terra-cotta bells round a gilded lotus flower, celebrating detrimental house, as does Arokayasala: Temple of the Thoughts (1996), with its natural medication drawers encircling aluminum lungs coated in fragrant natural pastes. His 1998-99 set up Zodiac Homes fashions, at a modest scale, six present German constructions on stilts: guests can take off their sneakers, mount the platform and stand underneath their hole constructions, scented with cinnabar.
Outside works create a compelling complement to the galleries. Alicja Kwade’s Pars professional Toto (2020), an set up of 11 monumental stone globes starting from 70-250 cm in diameter, speckle the courtyard like an outsized recreation of boules or errant marbles; Pinaree Sanpitak’s Breast Stupa Topiary (2013), a collection of stainless-steel varieties, dots the higher terrace. As is his signature, James Turrell’s 1988 Straight Up set up frames the sky above; the museum hosts devoted dawn and sundown packages for guests. Sho Shibuya’s 85-meter-long print on vinyl, MEMORY, was specifically commissioned by the museum, massively enlarging the Dawn from a Small Window collection, by which the artist painted the sensuous colours of dawn over the entrance web page of the New York Instances.
There’s an emphasis on interactive and participatory works, so guests can play. Surasi Kusolwong’s set up that includes an overturned and ceiling-suspended 1965 Volkswagen Beetle capabilities like a cradle by which guests can sit and watch a video; the set up additionally contains TAO BIN merchandising machines, from which one can purchase bitter cream Pringles, salted cocktail nuts, Pepsi or Nescafé. “There are some works which might be fragile, very delicate, however we don’t need to make our exhibition treasured,” Tezuka famous. The museum very a lot isn’t “a top-down establishment the place all the things is didactically defined. … We need to guarantee that we provide [visitors] the chance to coach themselves, to have their very own artistic company and be their very own lively viewers.”
The primary few reveals will showcase the gathering, and a few galleries will rotate out extra continuously than others (the show of Montien Boonma works will stay on the longest as a result of these works haven’t beforehand been seen in context with one another). As for the way in which the gathering will develop sooner or later, Chaivaranon confirmed that the establishment is “persevering with to amass work, and I’d say our technique has a number of completely different features, however one is to be fairly deep. It’s not only one work from the massive names.” Tezuka added that the “curatorial group is continuous to do the gathering analysis to determine that are the gaps within the assortment, whether or not that be cultural illustration or completely different mediums that artists globally are utilizing or experimenting with… How can we strategically fill in these gaps, whereas on the similar time creating alternatives for newly found artists to current their works?”
Past the museum partitions, Tezuka spoke a couple of “collective power” brewing within the metropolis’s artwork scene, citing the publicly funded artwork house BACC, the experimental programming at Bangkok Kunsthalle and the artwork vacation spot of the Khao Yai Artwork Forest a number of hours outdoors the town. On the horizon, there will probably be deCentral, an area specializing in regional artistic voices, and the Bangkok Biennale, which started in 2018, will return in fall 2026. In keeping with Tezuka, “each group is approaching artwork from a totally completely different means, bringing completely different views.” The scene is most positively one to look at.
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