As the Bangkok Art Biennale returns for its fifth edition, its artistic director discusses the tensions behind Angels & Mara, the challenges of bringing contemporary art into unexpected spaces, and how a festival that began in 2018 has learned to survive and grow.
BANGKOK, THAILAND – Returning from 29 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, the Bangkok Art Biennale will once again transform the Thai capital into a sprawling exhibition space, bringing contemporary art into temples, museums, cultural institutions, universities and shopping centres. Now entering its fifth edition, the biennale has grown from an ambitious experiment into a recurring feature of Bangkok’s cultural calendar, presenting international artists alongside practitioners from Thailand and the wider region. Yet its ambitions extend beyond the scale of its exhibitions.
For Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, the driving force behind the biennale, the more important question is what happens when art enters places where people might not ordinarily expect to encounter it, and what those encounters can reveal about the world outside.
The theme of the 2026 edition, Angels & Mara, provides a framework for exploring that question. Drawing on opposing forces of light and darkness, virtue and temptation, the theme is less interested in separating them than in examining the uncertain territory between them. “The world is not black and white, the world is not angelic or monstrous,” Apinan says. “The world is in between also.”
For Apinan, that in-between space is not simply a philosophical proposition. It reflects the political and social realities in which the biennale operates, from Thailand’s own history of confrontation and uncertainty to the conflicts, wars and instability unfolding elsewhere. The theme invites artists and audiences to consider how individuals and societies navigate those contradictions, without assuming that every question can be resolved into a neat moral conclusion. Art, in this context, does not necessarily have to reassure or offer an escape from difficult realities. It can be beautiful, uncomfortable, ambiguous or even unsettling, provided it gives people something worth thinking about.
“I come to see art, but it’s not necessarily beautiful, but it creates some question and ponder about the world we live in,” Apinan says. It is a revealing description of what he hopes the biennale can achieve. The objective is not to make every work immediately accessible or to ensure that every visitor arrives at the same interpretation. Instead, the encounter should leave room for curiosity, disagreement and reflection.
That approach is reflected in the breadth of the 2026 programme. The second wave of participating artists and collectives adds 27 names to the announced lineup, bringing the roster to 42. The participants include established international figures such as Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura, French duo Pierre & Gilles, Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, Chinese artist Liu Jianhua, Canadian-UK artist Sin Wai Kin and Indonesian artist Arahmaiani, alongside practitioners from Thailand and across Asia, Europe and North America. Their work spans painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance and multimedia, creating a programme in which contrasting approaches and generations can sit alongside one another.
Apinan is particularly enthusiastic about the opportunity for emerging artists to exhibit alongside internationally established practitioners. He sees the biennale as a setting in which younger artists can encounter different ways of working and thinking, beyond the more familiar cycle of commercial exhibitions and solo presentations. To explain the potential impact, he reaches for a sporting analogy: a young footballer suddenly finding themselves playing alongside global stars.
“It’s a chance of their life,” he says. For an emerging artist, he suggests, the experience of sharing an exhibition environment with someone of the stature of Morimura can be transformative. “It’s a chance for them to be able to be in the milieu, in the environment whereby you’re not just going for your commercial one solo shows, like all commercialised. But it’s a mix and match.”
The phrase captures something important about the biennale’s model. Rather than organising its programme around a single artistic generation, medium or commercial category, BAB creates opportunities for different practices to meet. That proximity can challenge assumptions about what contemporary art should look like, whose work deserves international attention and how artistic reputations develop. It also gives audiences a chance to discover unfamiliar artists while encountering names they may already know.
Yet the biennale’s most distinctive feature may be the city it occupies. Unlike an exhibition concentrated within a museum or gallery, BAB unfolds across Bangkok, placing contemporary works in buildings whose original purposes, histories and audiences differ dramatically. The 2026 edition will include four newly announced venues: centralwOrld, Siam Paragon, the National Museum Bangkok and the Silpakorn Art Centre. They join previously announced locations including Wat Arun, Wat Pho, Wat Prayoon, Museum Siam, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) and One Bangkok.
The resulting exhibition landscape moves between sacred architecture, national collections, cultural institutions and commercial destinations. It asks visitors to encounter art not only in spaces designed for contemplation, but also in places associated with worship, shopping, education and everyday movement through the city. The surroundings become part of the experience, influencing how people approach the work and what they expect to find there.
For Apinan, however, making art accessible through a variety of venues is not a straightforward exercise. Each setting has its own expectations, practical limitations and audiences, and not every artist is comfortable exhibiting in every environment. “It’s not just the temples that are difficult. Department stores are also difficult,” he says. “Different expectations, different milieu, different environment.”
Commercial spaces, in particular, can raise questions about the relationship between art and commerce. Some artists may be reluctant to present work in a shopping centre, while others see the opportunity to reach people who would not ordinarily visit an exhibition. The biennale has to negotiate those differences rather than assume that every work can be placed anywhere without changing its meaning.
Apinan nevertheless sees considerable potential in Bangkok’s commercial destinations. Shopping centres bring together people from “all walks of life”, including visitors who may have no particular intention of engaging with contemporary art. Some will walk past an installation without stopping; others may pause, wonder why it is there and begin asking questions. For Apinan, that moment of curiosity can be enough to establish a connection.
The challenge is to recognise that a work will be encountered differently depending on its location. “Obviously, when people walk in Wat Pho, it’s a different momentum, different rhythm to what when they walk in the department store,” he says. The pace of a temple visit is not the pace of a shopping trip, and an installation that rewards sustained attention may function differently from a moving image or immersive work encountered in a busy public environment. The objective is not to erase those distinctions, but to understand how they can shape an exhibition.
One Bangkok, which has supported the biennale from its early stages, illustrates how a commercial destination can become part of this wider cultural infrastructure. The addition of centralwOrld and Siam Paragon further extends the potential audience, placing contemporary art within the routines of people who might otherwise encounter it only through media coverage or social platforms. The National Museum Bangkok and Silpakorn Art Centre, meanwhile, offer opportunities to connect contemporary practice with established cultural and educational settings.
The biennale also encourages visitors to think about Bangkok’s historic sites as part of a broader cultural journey. Apinan describes the cluster of venues around the river, including the Silpakorn Art Centre, National Museum, Museum Siam, Wat Pho and Wat Prayoon, as a destination that could occupy an entire day. Visitors might move between exhibitions, eat, drink coffee and walk along the river, allowing art to become part of a wider experience of the city rather than a specialised cultural obligation. “Even the local people, they find that it’s the leisure time, where it’s not stuck in department stores,” he says. “You can go and watch Odyssey anytime. After you see Norland, you go and see real life.”
The idea is not to turn every visit into an intensive encounter with art, but to make the possibility of that encounter more ordinary. A visitor might arrive with a particular exhibition in mind and discover something unexpected along the way. Another might come for an entirely different reason and find themselves drawn into a work they had not planned to see. The biennale’s city-wide format allows for both possibilities.
This model has developed over four editions, each presenting its own logistical and institutional challenges. The first biennale took place in 2018, before the disruption of COVID-19. The 2020 edition unfolded during the pandemic and amid Thailand’s pro-democracy demonstrations, a period when some artists called for Thai participants to withdraw from the biennale in protest. Apinan remembers the experience as a time of “trauma”, but the organisation continued to operate through those pressures.
“Thick and thin, we have survived,” he says.
Survival, in this context, has required more than maintaining a programme every two years. The biennale has had to build relationships with venues, artists, sponsors and audiences while responding to circumstances that can change dramatically between editions. Apinan says support from sponsors has grown stronger, with hotels, real-estate companies and other businesses increasingly approaching the organisation rather than waiting to be asked. He also believes that four months of exhibitions and public programmes help the biennale become more familiar to Bangkok residents, creating what he describes as a “crescendo” of cultural activity.
The organisation relies on partnerships across the private and public sectors rather than heavy direct government funding. That structure brings its own negotiations and compromises, but Apinan sees the experience as part of the process of developing a sustainable institution. “We learn from that too, but not just survive, but go forward,” he says.
For a festival of this scale, longevity also depends on changing public expectations. A biennale cannot simply assume that audiences will return because its previous edition was successful. It must continue to offer reasons for people to explore new work, visit unfamiliar venues and engage with contemporary art on their own terms. Apinan hopes that, over time, the biennale’s name will become sufficiently familiar that even Bangkok taxi drivers recognise it.
That ambition is modest in one sense, but revealing in another. Recognition would mean that the biennale had become part of the city’s everyday vocabulary rather than remaining a specialist event known mainly to artists, collectors and cultural professionals. It would suggest that contemporary art had gained a more visible place within the city’s public life.
The fifth edition of BAB arrives with a programme that seeks to extend that reach while retaining the complexity of its central theme. Angels & Mara does not promise an uncomplicated vision of humanity, nor does it suggest that art can resolve the conflicts and inequalities that shape contemporary society. Instead, it creates a framework in which artists can examine those contradictions and audiences can encounter them from different perspectives.
For Apinan, that is the value of bringing art into unexpected environments. The encounter does not have to end with agreement, admiration or even complete understanding. A work might prompt a question, challenge an assumption or simply make someone pause in a place where they would otherwise have continued walking.
The biennale’s ambition is therefore as much about changing habits of attention as it is about presenting an international exhibition. By moving through temples, museums, shopping centres and public spaces, visitors are invited to see Bangkok differently, and perhaps to reconsider the boundaries they place around art itself.
Apinan is realistic about the uncertainty of that exchange. Not every visitor will respond to every work, and not every encounter will produce an immediate revelation. But the possibility of an unexpected connection is precisely what makes the undertaking worthwhile. “Have I wasted time coming to see Bangkok Art Biennale? I hope not,” he says.
It is a deliberately open-ended question. The answer will depend on the individual visitor, the work they encounter and the circumstances in which they see it. In a biennale devoted to the grey areas between opposing forces, perhaps the most fitting outcome is not a single conclusion, but a willingness to remain with the questions for a little longer.
From 29 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, those questions will be distributed across Bangkok’s sacred, historical, cultural and commercial spaces. The challenge for the biennale is to make them visible; what audiences do with them is another matter entirely
Photo Credit: Bangkok Art Biennale
Bangkok Art Biennale 2026 runs from 29th October 2026 to 28th February 2027. More information available here
