3 times a day, a fragile fog drifts from nozzles hidden in flower beds and rolls down sloping hills and into a big clearing within the Khao Yai Artwork Forest.
The white mist unfurls throughout the panorama like a wave, skimming the grass and enveloping the forest-edged valley, earlier than fading into a skinny layer of moisture.
Fog is uncommon on this rural a part of central Thailand, bordering Khao Yai National Park. However this work, “Khao Yai Fog Forest, Fog Panorama #48435” (2024) — created by the Japanese artist, Fujiko Nakaya — transcends nature itself.
To create the fog and choreograph its presence throughout the ten,000-square-foot website, Ms. Nakaya altered the panorama and collaborated with Aquaria, a San Francisco firm whose expertise harvests atmospheric moisture for clear, drinkable water.
“In Buddhist philosophy, water descends from the sky to heal and join us with nature,” mentioned Marisa Chearavanont, a Korean-born artwork patron and philanthropist who lives in Bangkok, in an interview on the Khao Yai Artwork Forest at nightfall, because the forest fog surrounded us.
“This mist is sort of a non secular cleaning expertise.”
In 2022, pushed by a private seek for therapeutic in nature after Thailand’s Covid lockdown, Ms. Chearavanont, who’s in her early 60s, purchased the location, some 160 acres of flatlands and forested hills in Khao Yai, a weekend retreat for Bangkok residents about 100 miles northeast of town.
As soon as the important infrastructure was constructed, the Khao Yai Artwork Forest opened in February 2025, with artworks built-in within the pure panorama for guests to discover freely throughout opening hours (admission is 500 Thai baht, or $14.64).
“We invite artists to create site-specific works utilizing supplies they discover regionally, like water, wooden, stones, soil and wind,” Ms. Chearavanont mentioned.
Amid the timber, a towering stone sculpture titled “God” (2024) by the Italian artist Francesco Enviornment options two boulders sourced regionally and stacked vertically.
Fragments of 10 stupas titled “Pilgrimage to Eternity” (2024) by the Thai artist who goes by the pseudonym Ubatsat, constructed from native soil and coated in some moss, are steadily being re-appropriated by nature.
The Berlin duo Elmgreen & Dragset have created a working cocktail lounge titled “Okay-Bar” (2024) devoted to the hard-drinking German artist Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997. As soon as a month at nightfall, the small, well-lighted constructing — with bar stools and a group of bottles — involves life, and a bartender serves drinks to guests.
Standing watch in a rice area is a bronze model of the French artist Louise Bourgeois’s 30-foot-high spider sculpture known as “Maman” (1999–2002), on mortgage from the Easton Basis, which is devoted to preserving Bourgeois’s legacy.
The rice area is a part of the Artwork Forest’s natural farming program, which goals to advertise therapeutic by means of meals in partnership with the Chef Cares Basis, which Ms. Chearavanont based within the early days of the Covid pandemic. Initially targeted on feeding frontline staff, the muse now works to help underprivileged communities, partially by offering culinary coaching to youngsters in want.
The emphasis on site-specific artwork, regenerative farming and Buddhist rules units the Khao Yai Artwork Forest other than different main outside artwork initiatives —corresponding to Inhotim museum in Brumadinho, Brazil, set inside a 140-hectare botanical backyard; Château La Coste, within the Provence area of France; and Naoshima island in Japan.
“In our fashionable, digital world, we have to contact the land and restore our reference to nature,” mentioned Ms. Chearavanont, who’s married to Soopakij Chearavanont, chairman of Charoen Pokphand Group, an agro-industrial conglomerate in Thailand. “The thought behind the Artwork Forest was to convey communities collectively round artwork, assist them reconnect with the land, feed them and restore the surroundings.”
On a hilltop, “Madrid Circle” (1986) by the British Land Artwork pioneer Richard Lengthy options stones organized in a circle, referencing his observe of strolling as artwork. The work was half of a big batch that Ms. Chearavanont acquired from the property of the Italian collector Giuseppe Panza in a sale facilitated by Stefano Rabolli Pansera, then a director on the gallery Hauser & Wirth.
In 2022, Mr. Rabolli Pansera, an architect and curator, who has curated a number of nationwide pavilions on the Venice Biennale, moved from St. Moritz, Switzerland, to Bangkok to steer Ms. Chearavanont’s artwork programming as director.
On recommendation of Mr. Rabolli Pansera, Ms. Chearavanont purchased the Bangkok Kunsthalle in 2023, as an city counterpart to the Artwork Forest. Situated within the metropolis’s Chinatown, the almost 65,000-square-foot Brutalist complicated, which had been a fire-damaged printing home, includes three linked buildings.
As within the Artwork Forest the place artists work with native supplies, within the Kunsthalle, artists are invited to reply to the constructing’s decayed state by means of artwork, movie, music and structure.
“We don’t plan to revive the constructing,” Mr. Rabolli Pansera mentioned in an interview on the Kunsthalle, the place soot and traces of smoke had been nonetheless seen on the partitions. “We invite artists to make interventions within the structure itself. They’ll drill all of the holes they need. Just like the forest, the constructing is just not a passive backdrop. It shapes the artwork and is a part of the expertise. That is land artwork 2.0.”
Opened as an arts venue in 2024, the Kunsthalle usually hosts exhibitions by native and worldwide artists. In June, the Thai collective Yunglai will current a present reflecting on the constructing’s historical past as a printing home. From Sept. 1 to Feb. 15, the present “Description With out Place” will function six inhabitation cells or “Cellules d’Habitation,” tiny residing pods created by the French Israeli artist Meir Eshel, who was identified professionally as Absalon.
“We would like our undertaking to be enticing to artists and to indicate that we are able to produce new content material and create new alternatives right here,” Mr. Rabolli Pansera mentioned. “We additionally need to work with different international artwork establishments.”
Subsequent March, out on the Khao Yai Artwork Forest, the Colombian artist Delcy Morelos will unveil a site-specific set up close to an excavated rock backyard, following an introduction facilitated by the Dia Artwork Basis, a New York-based nonprofit group that initiates, helps and preserves artwork initiatives.
“We visited the Artwork Forest with Delcy after her show in New York, and she or he has now proposed an unbelievable undertaking for the location,” mentioned Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Artwork Basis in a telephone interview from New York.
“We’re additionally discussing exhibiting works from our assortment on the Bangkok Kunsthalle, our first exhibition in Thailand,” Ms. Morgan mentioned. “I plan to return with my curatorial workforce. Supporting artists collectively is vital.”
That collaboration represents a small half of a bigger cultural transformation in Thailand, fueled by collectors and personal funding.
Dib Bangkok, the nation’s first main museum for worldwide modern artwork, based by the Thai businessman Purat Osathanugrah and housed in a warehouse reworked based on the Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast’s imaginative and prescient, is ready to open in December.
The Bangkok Art Biennale was first held in 2018, and it has since established itself on Southeast Asia’s modern artwork calendar. The Entry Bangkok Artwork Honest debuted final December.
Ms. Chearavanont has already reshaped Thailand’s cultural panorama. Her ambition is to place the nation as a vacation spot for modern artwork by attracting guests and inspiring worldwide artists to have interaction with its tradition and surroundings.
“I’m not accumulating artwork, I’m sharing artwork,” Ms. Chearavanont mentioned. “My imaginative and prescient is to place Thailand on the geopolitical map of the artwork world.”
