Exploring Bangkok’s Creative Scene — What to See and Do

It was on her second visit that philanthropist Marisa Chearavanont heard the voice of the building. Or perhaps the voice came from within herself. The difference matters less in Thailand than it would in America, because Thai culture delineates less strictly between the categories of human experience— between daily habit, artistic expression, and religious belief. A voice spoke to her, saying the building needed a new life, so Chearavanont, who is married to the chairman of Thailand’s largest private company, bought it. Now the burned-out Brutalist hulk has been reincarnated as the nonprofit contemporary art center Bangkok Kunsthalle. 

When I arrived for a walk-through one Sunday afternoon, young Thais clad all in black paced the sidewalk like starlings. The artwork they were flocking toward was Nostalgia for Unity, a sound installation by the Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, who was influenced by the international art star Rirkrit Tiravanija. The wait time to enter was two hours.

Chearavanont, the Bangkok-based philanthropist, was born in Korea and educated in the United States. She became Thai by marriage 37 years ago, and although for most of that time the family lived in Hong Kong, her charitable foundations for art, food, innovation, and craft have all been focused on Thailand. 

Chearavanont told me in her carefully modulated English that the Kunsthalle, which spans three conjoined buildings in Bangkok’s Chinatown, formerly housed a publishing company. Its Thai-Chinese matriarch built a monopoly in textbooks, but a fire destroyed the business. Chearavanont compared the building to a phoenix. She hopes Kunsthalle can also be a “textbook”: a means to instruct and inspire younger generations. 

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What was odd, or perhaps inspirational, is that the building remains mostly unrestored. Future improvements to the soot-stained, sun-bleached concrete skeleton will be led by the artists who exhibit there. Or, in the jargon of the Kunsthalle’s high-minded discourse, the curatorial program is an architectural project. 

Why does this matter? Because of all Southeast Asia’s tiger-cub economies, Thailand is the preeminent luxury tourism destination and an enclave of vast generational wealth. Its capital glints with commercial mega-developments: the 36-story Aman hotel and residences, capped by a multistory penthouse; the $1.4 billion rebuild of the Dusit Thani hotel as a retail-hospitality-residential Xanadu; the 42-acre, nearly $3.6 billion One Bangkok, which will contain five hotels, including the city’s first Ritz-Carlton. 

The Kunsthalle is tiny by comparison, but radical — if gently so, in keeping with nonaggressive Buddhist principles. It posits itself as an artist-led model of urban redevelopment and an alternative to the hegemonic market-driven development model that serves Eurocentric, postcolonial economic imperatives — i.e., it’s taking on the whole global capitalism thing. 

Chearavanont led me to the second-floor gallery where the artist Arunanondchai had created his sound installation. He began, Chearavanont explained, by gathering ashes from unswept corners of the burned-out building and mixing them with resin to pour a new gallery floor. A border of script around the room’s edge is meant to be read while walking, the same way monks recite their circumambulatory prayers. As I made my way around the gallery, my eyes fell on the fragment landscape of morning, blood of the earth, perhaps a reference to Bangkok’s founding at Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, after the ancient Siamese capital of Ayutthaya was burned to the ground. Another fire, another rebirth. 

As the soundtrack in the gallery shifted tone, from dark rumblings to choral uplift reminiscent of cathedral melodies, Chearavanont offered her interpretation of the work. “It is a blessing for the phoenix to arise,” she said.

“This is a life,” she continued, indicating the building and, perhaps, something larger than the building, something as large as Bangkok, as large as our burning world. “Now we are coming into a new cycle.”

It occurred to me later that the work’s namesake “unity” was us, the many visitors drawn to the Kunsthalle. Arunanondchai dared us collectively to imagine how a creative convergence can generate astonishing power. It is in this specific sense that I can say Bangkok is rising: the city has reached liftoff.

Or I could put the same thought differently by citing a trendy Thai streetwear brand that promotes itself on social media with hilarious cutie-on-the-street interviews with fabulously dressed youths. The brand is called I Wanna Bangkok, and all the cool kids were wearing it.

Bangkok today is a pulsing cultural node, and it beacons to a global creative class, initiates in the esoterica of cool, the types who in earlier “moments” convened in Mexico City, Lisbon, the Meatpacking District, Williamsburg, Hoxton/Shoreditch, Tokyo, and — all the way back to the 1960s —SoHo. During my stay, I met entrepreneurs, designers, and chefs who moved to Bangkok from London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. The creative subtribes I saw spanned the obsessions of youth culture: third-wave-coffee geeks, mezcal-junkie mixologists, vinyl nerds spinning turntables at listening cafés, sneakerheads, and everywhere — everywhere — Tik-Tok auteurs documenting their carefully curated lives. 

Bangkok’s cultural innovators are supported in part by the city’s ultrarich high-society patrons (the “hi-so” crowd), as well as the millions of merely well-to-do business-class travelers arriving annually. Restaurants proliferate at the high end of the economy, launched by Michelin-caliber chefs and their former protégés. The youngsters often use their impeccable training to create easygoing restaurants with shared plates and chill vibes rather than uptight formality. My favorites among them made the oh-so-serious, control-freak culinary laboratories geared to the World’s 50 Best list feel outdated and irrelevant.

Standouts included the impossible-to-get-into Haawm, a supper club run by a Thai-American chef with culinary charisma and chemical-pink skater hair, and the wine bar/small-plates counter Charmkrung, in the trendy Talat Noi neighborhood. The latter is a follow-up to Charmgang, a small curry house opened a hundred yards away by a group of young chefs who used to work for David Thompson, the Australian éminence grise of Thai gastronomy. 

Chef-owner Aruss “Jai” Lerlerstkull summarized the difference between the two “Charms” this way: Charmkrung “goes with drinks,” Charmgang “goes with rice” — grazing versus chowing down. I ate at the counter at Charmkrung, and was at first too blissed-out to realize that I was seated next to Sanya Souvanna Phouma, a nightlife impresario turned restaurateur who is considered an avatar of Bangkok cool. 

I told him I missed Funky Lam, a COVID-casualty restaurant of his, where on a previous trip I enjoyed earthy Lao food and a deep-cut-funk soundtrack. Phouma said he’s bringing it back — right next door. “I asked if they minded,” he said, nodding across the counter at Chef Jai, who looked like he didn’t mind at all. The neighborhood will benefit, he said, from having “a circuit” of like-minded new-wave Thai restaurants.

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With all the restaurants, bars, hotels, and apartments to kit out, Bangkok’s interior design scene is also in a boom cycle. The P. Tendercool showroom at Warehouse 30, a retail-and-gallery complex in the adjacent neighborhood of Bang Rak, displayed a table made of reclaimed antique tropical hardwood on a brass base for 1.8 million baht — about $50,000. It was marked sold. Across the parking lot, stylish shopaholics and selfie-stick lookie-loos trailed through 333 Gallery, where Thai photographer Sophirat Muangkum was discussing her exhibition of nude photographs, “Decentralized Thainess,” an investigation into Thai identity.

“I think Thailand is about to have its moment,” said Bangkok-based interior designer May Redding, who, with her sister, chef Ann Redding, designed Manhattan’s much-lamented Thai restaurant Uncle Boons and its spinoff, Thai Diner. “I was in fashion in New York for twenty years and I wondered when it would happen. China had it. Korea had it. Now I feel the energy in the younger generation here. They’re observing things at a global level but putting their unique turn on it.” 

And how would Redding characterize that uniquely Thai turn? Her description suited the maximalist aesthetic: “Super expressive, bold, escapist, loud in a very good way, very Pop art, very throwback —very sixties and seventies — but modern.”

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All of that more-is-more marks a hard turn away from quiet luxury, rational Modernism, and the seemingly endless influence of Zen-Nordic minimalism. For example: the full-bling interiors at the Michelin-listed Ojo, the Mexican restaurant at the Standard, Bangkok Mahanakhon, which reads like a Las Vegas revival on a private spaceship. Or the new Soho House, where the tropical interiors layer colors on patterns on patterns on colors. 

Each place was a bravura performance in the art of intricacy, a quality I also associate with Thai cuisine. “In our cooking, we put in everything we can,” Chef Jai said after he rattled off the two dozen ingredients in his “Siamese oyster ceviche,” a French half-shell undercoated with relish, seasoned with sauce, mixed with herbs, and sprinkled with secret ingredients — a one-bite metaphor for BKK style.

Bangkok makes the most sense from the river. This thought occurred to me as I watched sunrise over the Chao Phraya from my 10th-floor suite at Capella Bangkok, a serene bankside hotel. Humidity diffused the mango sun, and the mackerel skies had a thickening look that foretold afternoon rain. A red passenger boat motored upstream, unzipping the river in its wake. On the far side, construction cranes stood like shorebirds on one leg. Bangkok doesn’t just straddle the flow like New York or St. Louis, but seems to grow from it, like a forest of mangroves. 

I took boats everywhere I could: to the riverfront mall IconSiam, to Wat Arun, to alleyways near the Grand Palace where amulet dealers hawked their magic charms, to dinner at the chic waterfront restaurant Horsamut, near the Pak Khlong Talat flower market. On a longtail-boat tour of the backwater canals and tourist highlights, guide Danuda “Emmie” Limwattanamongkol used our floating perspective to explain the origins of this waterborne city, invoking a historical narrative unified — again — by the river. 

The capital’s founder Taksin, she explained, was a Chinese-Thai general turned king who landed at Wat Arun with an army of Thai, Chinese, Persian, Indian, Portuguese, and Japanese mercenaries. “The Chao Phraya was the melting pot of the world,” Limwattanamongkol said. The next king, Rama I, founder of the current dynasty, built his Grand Palace on the opposite bank and moved the Chinese immigrants who had been living there to a spot downriver, where Chinatown still stands. Wealthy Chinatown merchants later built riverfront mansions in Talat Noi to be near the cooling breezes, and in 1862, King Rama IV — he’s the king in The King and I — ordered the construction of Charoen Krung Road through Talat Noi and up the river’s east bank. Now the oldest road in Thailand is new again as the cool kids follow it into gentrifying Talat Noi, and one of those old teak mansions has been restored to house the riverfront café Hong Sieng Kong. 

A few days later, I took another boat upriver to the Siam, a family-owned boutique hotel in a neighborhood of villas and royal palaces. Nick Downing, the general manager, met me at the dock, and later we sat on the terrace to watch the river go by. “The boat is what makes us part of Bangkok,” he told me, explaining that the Siam has a vintage launch that it uses to transport guests. “The river is the link.” 

Downing was urbane, charming, shrewd — straight out of Central Casting — and the hotel, which was decorated by star hotel designer Bill Bensley, looked like a grand private residence. It is filled with the Sukosol family’s extensive collection of antiques and vintage cinema memorabilia. I couldn’t help asking Downing if he’d seen HBO’s The White Lotus. Better than that, he responded: The White Lotus had seen him. Scouts had visited the Siam, but in the end the production team chose other locations in Bangkok (rumor has it the Mandarin Oriental makes an appearance), Koh Samui, and Phuket. Still, Downing predicted everyone was going to feel the White Lotus effect. 

“Season Three will change Thailand,” he said. “It’s going to be great for Bangkok.”

Nine strangers in a room. We met in a modest house off a narrow alley in a residential neighborhood an hour’s crawl through traffic from the riverfront. My rideshare driver refused to believe we were in the right place and insisted on walking me to the door, where a placard read haawm, the underground supper club from Thai-American chef Dylan Eitharong. 

The other guests included a tattooed Swiss couple who go to Southeast Asia frequently to surf and skate; a young Hong Kong couple; two Scandinavian food obsessives; a punky Gen-Z Bangkok native and her partner, an Englishman who moved to the city some 20 years ago. They were the kind of sophisticated, free-spending travelers every tourism board in the world tries to attract, and they captured my attention as much as the food.

To be fair, the food was brilliant, the group agreed — and these were tough critics happy to throw bombs at some of the world’s best-known restaurants. The many dishes Eitharong brought to the table were traditionally Thai, if not strictly “authentic.” A salad with northern-style pork sausage, for example, included clams, which no Thai chef in his right mind would ever make, but a Portuguese chef might. The food was authentic to Eitharong’s lived experienc — a generational “new authentic.”

I called him the next day to get his take on how Bangkok’s food scene had changed since my last visit, in 2018. He worried that international best-of lists had warped the restaurant culture. “Now it’s either street food or people fighting for awards,” he said. Mid-priced Thai restaurants serving Thai food made by Thai chefs to a Thai clientele were, in his view, losing ground. “Bangkok is moving toward Westernization,” Eitharong said. “It’s becoming more of a global city.”

I found a delicious rebuttal to Eitharong’s fretting at Lon Lon Local Diner, an office workers’ lunch spot near the Standard, and at Err, where the team behind the acclaimed Bo.lan offered a deep dive into grassroots rural cooking at affordable prices. My idea of Thai food got scrambled when I chatted with Pichaya “Pam” Soontornyanakij at her Chinatown restaurant Potong, a hot ticket on the best-of lists. Chef Pam is a fifth-generation Bangkok native, and after a fine-dining apprenticeship in New York, she returned home to honor her Chinese heritage through cooking. Potong is a deeply personal restaurant, imbued with memory and storytelling. It fills the five-story family home built by the first generation of her family to arrive in Bangkok; the menu is a personal essay on Chinese-Thai cuisine, even if the tweezer-plated dishes look nothing like the steaming plates of noodles and stir-fries sold elsewhere in Chinatown. 

Chef Pam told me a story about pad thai. The national dish is actually a fusion of culinary cultures, she explained: it was promoted during World War II by a prime minister who realized the need to establish a unified identity and support rice farmers and their exports. From a combination of inexpensive Chinese rice noodles and Thai flavors, a national dish was born. The name combined pad, meaning stir-fried, with Thai, which comes from the word for free and in 1939 replaced the country’s older name Siam, or dark, as in dark-skinned. What the prime minister invented, then, was stir-fried noodles for a free people. Noodles for everyone. Thai cooking.

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“This is a Buddhist country,” I was repeatedly reminded, in reference to topics as diverse as social tolerance for the LGBTQ community and Thailand’s legendary service culture. I chuckled at the thought of hospitality conducted under threat of karmic justice — be kind to the hotel guests or suffer punishment in the afterlife. Twice in two days I was taken to feed catfish at riverside temples. You buy a baggie of fish chow and throw it in the river to win “merit,” or karmic brownie points. The sacred fish grow fat as watermelons. Is it any wonder that tourists are indulged? 

On my last afternoon in town, I met Italian-born curator Stefano Rabolli Pansera, the director of Bangkok Kunsthalle, who had just flown in from Art Basel in Switzerland. A former gallery director at global powerhouse Hauser & Wirth, he seemed immune to both jet lag and heat as he took me on a fast-paced tour of his favorite spots near Chinatown: the commercial art gallery Storage and the vibey cocktail bar Kuˇ next door. 

Pansera told me about taking international artists on the same tour — major, museum-anointed stars. Their enthusiasm matched his own, he recalled, but “artists are the compass,” meaning they are the ones who indicate where the culture will go next.

Pansera clearly believes the compass points toward a future Bangkok that represents the talents and ambitions of the multicultural, polytheistic, youthful, omnivorous Global South. 

One reason, in his estimation, might at first seem a little oblique: the Buddhist city is just far enough away from the traditional cultural empires of Europe and America to be out of sight. Benign neglect has allowed its creativity to grow and flower in the partial obscurity of the global margins, similar to how neighborhoods like Shoreditch or SoHo offered artists sanctuary because they were derelict — cheap rent being essential to creative prospering. 

His cheerful assessment of Bangkok’s future contained a kernel of worry, however. The precious moment is now, he seemed to believe, before gentrification reaches into the scruffy, artist-friendly enclaves such as the one where we sat. 

“Thailand is at the margin of empire,” Pansera said as I sipped a quickly-warming beer and sweated in the afternoon heat. “But empire is coming. In six years, Chinatown will be just like the Meatpacking District.”

A version of this story first appeared in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “City of Light.”