Art Galleries and Creative Spaces in Bangkok
A visual guide from the Bangkok travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
Bangkok's art scene is compact enough to cover in two days and dispersed enough that you need a plan. The centre of gravity has moved twice in a decade, first to the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre at the Siam junction, then west to Charoen Krung, where the Creative District turned wartime warehouses, a monumental post office and a run of Chinese-Portuguese shophouses into studios and project spaces. Openings cluster on Thursday and Friday evenings, cost nothing, generally involve wine, and remain the fastest way to meet the people actually working in the scene.
The big rooms
The Bangkok Art and Culture Centre sits directly at BTS National Stadium and connects by skywalk to MBK: nine floors around a spiralling white atrium, with the serious exhibitions on the upper levels and small independent shops and a good hand-brew coffee bar lower down. Entry to the main galleries is usually free. MOCA Bangkok, out on Vibhavadi Rangsit Road north of Chatuchak, is its opposite: a purpose-built private museum with five floors of modern and contemporary Thai painting, best reached by taxi and worth a half day. Both tend to close on Mondays, as do most commercial galleries.
Creative districts
Charoen Krung rewards walking. Warehouse 30, a row of converted godowns on Soi 30, mixes exhibition space with design shops and a cafe; the TCDC design centre occupies the upper floors of the Grand Postal Building nearby; ATT19 and River City cover the antiques-adjacent and the contemporary respectively. Across the river at Klongsan, The Jam Factory pairs a bookshop, gallery and restaurant in an old warehouse compound facing ICONSIAM. For commercial galleries, look to Sathorn Soi 1 and the Sukhumvit sois in the thirties: small spaces, strong programmes and short runs, so check what is currently hanging.