by Adela Lovric // Apr. 13, 2026
To be included in the Thailand Biennale is to have “made it” as an artist, or to be on the verge of doing so, propelled by the biennial’s implicit seal of approval. That was, at least, how it was described during my visit: as Southeast Asia’s equivalent of the Venice Biennale. In Phuket, the fourth edition certainly performs the ambition of matching its European North Star in scale, featuring dozens of artists and venues across the island. Setting aside the question of whether such a mega-pursuit is necessary anywhere at all (it’s not), this relatively young biennial is riddled with some growing pains that seem to result from its push for magnitude, harboring tensions between conflicting aspirations.
Curated by Hera Chan, Marisa Phandharakrajadej, Arin Rungjang and David Teh under the title ‘Eternal [Kalpa],’ it foregrounds a conception of time that “creates and enables, that embraces cycles both cosmic and quotidian,” making way for more compassionate collective forms of coexistence. The notion of the Kalpa draws on Hindu cosmology: a single day in the life of Brahma, spanning 4.32 billion human years, ends in destruction by Shiva, after which darkness gives way to renewal, and a new cycle begins.
This proposition is explicity engaged with in ‘Instant Kalpa(s),’ one of 13 Salas, the biennial’s satellite programs. It takes place inside Baan Market, a fresh food market just off the city’s busiest streets where locals shop for produce. Tucked behind fruit stalls sits Barbansan, a bar and restaurant that hosts a group show curated by Juan Pablo García Sossa and Merv Espina. Its modest, compact and coherent presence counters the biennial’s strewn out ambition toward monumentality. Here, the focus is on the notion of tropical temporality, where time is shaped by weather, rituals and the rhythms of everyday life. The idea of an “instant” kalpa invokes paradox; it’s “an ephemeral eternity, a sachet-sized cosmos.”
Laura Campaz: ‘Senderos Encriptados (Encrypted pathways),’ 2022 // Photo © Christopher Wise
The artworks fold into the textures of the surroundings where enticing kitchen aromas waft through the air and Cambodian 1960s rock spills from the speakers, mixing with the bar’s hum of chatter. Within Barbansan’s already characterful interior, Isola Tong’s ‘Landscapes on Fire’ (2025), a pyrography triptych on banig, sits seamlessly alongside works like Transmediale Research Netting Group’s ‘Techne·Shrines’ (2025) and Laura Campaz’s installation ‘Senderos Encriptados (Encrypted pathways)’ (2022) suspended mid-air. The exhibition’s most compelling component, however, lies just outside Barbansan. Three videos are installed within the market, encountered as part of its daily, spontaneous rhythms. In this setting, video art—with its raw, associative and diaristic qualities—feels more at home than within pristine gallery walls. Works by Tong, Hoo Fan Chon and Moe Satt align with the project’s proposition that time is not a straight and steady linear stream, but rather tidal, cyclical and relational.
Hoo Fan Chon: ‘My Earthy Taste | 我的土味 MV,’ single-channel video, 2018 // Photo © Christopher Wise
One of Thailand’s most popular destinations, Phuket caters to tourists with an overwhelming efficiency—a sore point for locals and visitors alike, thematized in several artworks across the biennial, inlcuding Speedy Grandma’s elaborate, bitingly humorous installation at the disused Mellow Pillow Hotel. Movement is channeled along a well-established circuit: beaches, temples and colorful streets of the Old Town, lined with hip cafes, shops and restaurants. The biennial, however, doesn’t map neatly over this grid; instead, it pulls visitors away into off-center sites. And, while presenting artworks that reflect on Phuket’s histories and current conditions, it situates audiences within spaces not typically associated with art, where local life unfolds, or once did.
Take, for example, Baan Turtle Phuket—originally the residence of a 19th-century tin-mining baron, later home to Thailand’s national airline office—where artworks trace Phuket’s transformation from extractive activities, such as mining and fishing, to the affective economy of tourism. Or the Chao Fah Power Station in the island’s hinterland, formerly the power station of a tin ore processing site and later Phuket’s first main power grid. This vestige of industrial past now houses works that examine histories of extraction, the colonial logic that informed it and the cultures of resistance that emerged from it—such as Ibrahim Mahama’s large-scale textile works with reclaimed rubber material from Ghana’s defunct tire company, which teases out parallels with Thailand’s own history of rubber extraction and processing.
Natthapong Samakkaew: ‘Hello Guys #2,’ 2025 // Courtesy of Un.thai.tled
Among such potent, contextually situated projects is the group exhibition ‘In Nobody’s Service,’ part of the biennial’s satellite programs. Located in one of Phuket’s red-light districts, the show departs from reductive clichés projected onto Thai and Filipina women and queer communities, examining the roots of racist stereotypes while illuminating suppressed histories and lived realities through a restorative lens. The project is presented by Un.thai.tled, a collective founded in Berlin by Sarnt Utamachote and Wisanu Phu-artdun. On a street lined with erotic massage parlors, Natthapong Samakkaew’s work ‘Hello Guys #2’ (2025)—a pink neon sign mounted on a pink facade—becomes a double-edged welcome: not to the services expected here, but to an experience of a place beyond surface assumptions. The work stems from Samakkaew’s research on a Frankfurt brothel in Taunusstraße and the Thai women working there. Inside, across four floors, artists examine sex work, care labor, gender and migration, forming a collective space where vulnerability becomes, however briefly, a mode of liberation. An installation by Utamachote, Phu-artdun and Manika Tejapaibul weaves interviews with Thai Isaan women about marrying Western men and migrating abroad, foregrounding their aspirations, dignity and self-perception. Bussaraporn Thongchai’s text-based work and Krisanta Caguioa-Mönnich’s portraits document the bureaucratic and emotional violence of migration through testimonies from clients of Ban Ying, Berlin’s oldest shelter for trafficked women.
Rosalia Namsai Engchuan: ‘Energy Bodies,’ 2024; ‘Bodies and Blooms,’ 2025 // Courtesy of Un.thai.tled
Rosalia Namsai Engchuan’s video ‘Energy Bodies’ (2024) traces how Thai massage shifted from a spiritually grounded, relational healing practice into a commodified global industry shaped by colonial and neoliberal forces. It charts the displacement of Thai conceptions of the body as an interconnected energy system by Western individualism, introduced through missionary activity and intensified by U.S. military presence during the Vietnam War. As mass tourism expanded, Thai massage was absorbed into the hospitality sector, often entangled with sex work and exploitation, as Engchuan shows through a poetic, research-based work. Resembling a film set, Utamachote’s ‘This one for tomorrow’ (2025), an interactive installation with found objects, symbolically reconstructs the rooms—and thus sets the stage for interior worlds—of women working nearby. Visitors are invited to lean out the window and light a cigarette, briefly connecting with the people flattened by the common perception of their labor. Similarly, Oat Montien’s video ‘Patpong Narcissus’ (2023) and a series of pastel drawings humanize gay sex workers in Patpong, recasting a figure typically reduced to a projection screen for other people’s desires as the main character in their own fantasies.
Oat Montien: ‘Pearl Boy Operating Theater,’ 2025 // Courtesy of Thailand Biennale Phuket
In Pearl Theater, once a nightlife and adult entertainment venue and now an attraction hall lined with trompe l’oeil murals, Montien’s work frames Phuket—the so-called Pearl of the Andaman—as a site where pleasure and exploitation intertwine. Creating a setting between operating theater and nightclub, his multimedia installation draws parallels between pearl cultivation and the island’s nightlife economy, exploring how queer sex workers are shaped by external pressures, implanted with “foreign [economic and social] matter.” The topic of sex work continues in works by Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative. Their latest installation, developed with Thailand’s Empower Foundation, stages a ceremonial encounter between artists and sex workers, showcased on a campy podium with flags and plastic flowers, proposing transnational solidarity as an unfinished but necessary practice across uneven common ground.
Thuy Tien Nguyen: ‘Press Club,’ 2025 // Courtesy of Thailand Biennale Phuket
There are more strong works at this biennial than one can mindfully absorb, unless having the privilege of returning to it repeatedly over time. Among the few that vividly stand out are works by Taiki Sakpisit, Thuy Tien Nguyen, Zhao Yao, Haig Aivazian, Taloi Havini, Anuwat Apimukmongkon and Koneksi Tamalanrea. In stretching across so many sites and agendas, meaningful encounters are sacrificed for fleeting impressions—an issue that casts a shadow over many other comparable exhibitions. Thailand Biennale Phuket’s most compelling moments emerge where works are embedded to resonate with the location and contexts are handled with care. Smaller, more focused projects like ‘In Nobody’s Service’ demonstrate how intimacy and deep ethical grounding can produce greater impact than sheer magnitude. While the use of off-site locations enriches the experience and deepens a sense of place, conflicting ambitions unsettle the experience. Thailand’s Ministry of Culture claims the biennial as both a driver of tourism and a platform for reflecting on human-environment relations, aims that in practice sit uneasily together. The extensive network of dispersed venues carries a visible cost: mostly empty shuttle buses running daily and energy-intensive cooling systems in previously inactive sites strain its claims to promoting sustainability, echoing the very logics of mass tourism that some of the artworks seek to critique. Behind the scenes, the question of systems of care for so many involved artists lingers. Perhaps it is a biennial that can do it all. More likely, its greatest hindrance comes from the belief that it must.
Exhibition Info
Thailand Biennale Phuket
Group Show: ‘Eternal [Kalpa]’
Exhibition: Nov. 29, 2025-Apr. 30, 2026
thailandbiennale.org
Various Locations
