Travelers have been flooding Bangkok, elevating it into the most visited city on the planet. And it’s not just tourists. International five-star hotel chains, global luxury brands and renowned chefs are jockeying for prime spaces amid the traffic-packed boulevards and soaring skyscrapers of Thailand’s capital, boosting the street-food mecca into a high-end playground.
But Bangkok, which this year is included in The New York Times Travel section’s 52 Places to Go, offers much more than bling. Numerous new independent hangouts — back-alley bars, small hotels, easygoing restaurants — are adding to the city’s cool factor with less fanfare and more street cred. And with an art scene driven by edgy new galleries and museums, the city is rising as a bohemian getaway as well.
Art
Three years ago, the New York City gallerist Harper Levine visited Bangkok for the first time in decades and was “amazed” by it.
“It was immediately clear the city had remarkable energy and promise,” he said, comparing it to “a younger New York.”
Mr. Levine secured a space in Siam Patumwan House, a sleek office tower, for his own gallery, Harper’s Bangkok, which opens on March 30 with a show by the American painter Joel Mesler.
“I expect Bangkok to rise quickly as a serious destination for the art world,” Mr. Levine said.
Two new venues are leading that rise. One, Bangkok Kunsthalle, occupies a gutted former printing plant full of raw concrete surfaces and tangled electrical cables.
With guidance from Stefano Rabolli Pansera, a former director of the Hauser & Wirth gallery in London, and a board that includes Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, the space hosts both international and Thai artists. Past exhibits have included Yoko Ono’s “Mend Piece,” a long table piled with ceramic shards that visitors are encouraged to reassemble, and the mystical black-on-white abstract paintings of the Thai-Chinese artist Tang Chang. A sister site, Khao Yai Art Forest, displays avant-garde outdoor works by the French American artist Louise Bourgeois and other artists on 89 acres about three hours by car from Bangkok.
Bangkok’s other new big art museum, Dib Bangkok, opened in December. Kulapat Yantrasast, a Thai architect who has executed projects for the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has transformed a onetime warehouse into a symphony of geometric forms by outfitting the main building with triangular rooftop fins, a conical tower and a tubular turret (which houses a James Turrell exhibition). Large, stone spheres by the Polish artist Alicja Kwadefill the rectangular courtyard.
Until Aug. 3 the inaugural exhibition, “(In)Visible Presence,” showcases works by 40 international artists, including Anselm Kiefer and Ms. Bourgeois, and Thai figures like Somboon Hormtientong, whose room of fallen temple columns ranks among the show’s most powerful creations—Seth Sherwood