Common ground

Thailand’s newest cultural landmark, the Khao Yai Art Forest, is a far cry from a conventional sculpture park: there’s much more to it than just manicured lawns and geometric shapes. Instead, it offers what Stefano Rabolli Pansera, the institution’s founding director, calls “land art 2.0”. “Thailand requires a new museum model,” he says, as he shows monocle around the hilly terrain in a golf cart. “We are trying to avoid the conventional paradigm, which has become obsolete.”

The Italian architect-turned-curator, who curated Angola’s award-winning pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, moved to Thailand two years ago to lead the project for Marisa Chearavanont – an art collector, philanthropist and member of one of the country’s wealthiest families. The pair met in 2019 when Pansera was working at the St Moritz outpost of Hauser & Wirth, where he oversaw the sale of 200 artworks once owned by collector Giuseppe Panza to Chearavanont. “Panza collected very minimalist works and I have a similar sensibility,” she says. When she acquired the pieces she had no idea what to do with them but, four years later, she returned to Pansera. Chearavanont had had an epiphany: she would start a museum on a former tapioca plantation three hours northeast of Bangkok, where she could share her collection with the public and exhibit new, site-specific works too.

Pansera packed his bags and was soon jetting around the world to commission works for the site. Among them is nonagenarian Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s “Fog Forest”, which blankets a hillside at Khao Yai with a water-vapour mist created using nozzles in the ground. “Nakaya reveals latent forces that we don’t see, such as wind, pressure and temperature,” says Pansera, who takes delight in running in and out of the artificial fog.

Pansera wants to add a major piece to the 85 hectare site every year or so; the next will be a giant work by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, who is creating a 400-metre-long table and a floating roof for eating and meditation. “To commission is to learn from these artists,” says Pansera, who has taken the wheel of our golf car from a nervous colleague to drive through a muddy patch of ground.
Until May visitors will be greeted by Louise Bourgeois’s nine-metre-tall bronze and steel spider sculpture “Maman”, which usually stalks the entrances of major art institutions across the globe. But from June most of the artworks and installations here will be more subtle and disguised. A video installation by Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, “Two Planet Series”, can be found in a clearing in the woods; viewers sit on logs to watch footage of a group of Thai villagers in a bamboo forest observing an Edouard Manet masterpiece. Meanwhile, a painting by German artist Martin Kippenberger is inside a bar created by Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset that opens only one day a month.

As our golf cart arrives at Francesco Arena’s 40-tonne stone sculpture “God”, Pansera recalls how the Italian artist chose this clearing in the forest by tramping through the undergrowth, stripping off his Metallica T-shirt and tying it around a tree trunk to mark his preferred spot. “My greatest curatorial desire is that when people enter the forest, they are surrounded by art without even knowing it,” says Pansera.

Though the Panza collection brought Pansera and Chearavanont together, only one piece from it is on display for the Art Forest’s opening: a stone sculpture by UK artist Richard Long, which occupies a sunny hilltop. Pavilions will eventually be built to house additional works that are less able to withstand the elements and others will be shown at the Bangkok Kunsthalle, the Art Forest’s sister venue in the Thai capital. It’s there that monocle meets Chearavanont a day after our Khao Yai trip. Pansera convinced her of the need to have a base in the city to funnel visitors to the mountains, so she acquired a former printworks that is now being reshaped, with plans for an open-air cinema on the roof. The museum held its first show in January 2024.

During our visit, Yoko Ono’s interactive artwork “Mend Piece” is on display and visitors are making their own sculptures out of glue, tape and broken crockery. Ono’s work was on loan from a South African foundation; this reflects Chearavanont’s move away from owning and acquiring to commissioning and displaying works held in storage. “Four or five years ago I started telling people that I’m not a collector any more,” she says.

Originally from South Korea, the 60-year-old Chearavanont has been involved in several major museums across the globe, including M1 in Hong Kong, where she and her husband lived for more than 20 years. In the 1980s she married into the Chearavanont family, which controls the century-old Charoen Pokphand Group – Thailand’s largest private company, focused on farming and food production. After raising four children, Chearavanont concentrated her efforts on building schools and helping to feed the underprivileged. It was only after the coronavirus pandemic confined three generations of the Chearavanont clan to the family’s estate in Khao Yai that she landed on the idea of creating an outdoor destination where people could enjoy artworks from her collection.

“I want to be an art sharer and invite artists here to be inspired and create something that I can share with all Thai people, as well as international visitors,” she says. Her investment in her adopted country seems to be working. “I used to travel back to Hong Kong a lot. But now, Hong Kong comes to me.” — L
art-forest.org