Forest Circle is a performative and interspersed symposium in a forest setting. It embarks on a quest to disclose the forest as a mode of experience and a method of learning in an immersive condition amidst things at play: a full and particular engagement between the experiencing subjects and their surroundings. The forest setting sheds new light on how we perceive and make sense of everything around and inside us, which is usually dismissed and bypassed as the misalignment of the well-categorised world driven by intelligibility. It is a site where knowledge is not a product of any higher cognitive process but is brought together by the very action of our bodily involvement in an environment. As Eduardo Kohn urges us to observe that “… seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.” The symposium gathers voices to form collaborative dialogues not only among participants but also with the surroundings. Everything present is an active producer as well as a modifier. It is no longer sure who or what is speaking or what we are listening to, the surroundings or what is offered. The conversation arises accumulatively through incidental and ambivalent perception in situ. Simultaneously, we co-exist both in the world of discourse and the world out there. The conversation aims to fracture dominant projections, stable interpretations, and cultural expectations, allowing new perspectives, new connections and new affects to emerge. To undertake this, the gathering invites its guests to re-suspend learning at the threshold of the encounters between seeing and unseeing, hearing and unhearing, doing and undoing. It unveils certain kinds of forest that may be marginal to centric views, something too silent to be heard, too dark to be seen, or too passive to be aware of. 

Speakers 
Doreen Bernath
Nop Katawat
Pu Kaewprasert
Pla Kaewprasert
Taratawan Krue-On

Bangkok Kunsthalle in collaboration with Doc Club present the Thai premiere of “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” by Johan Grimonprez, winner of the Special Jury Award for “Cinematic Innovation” at 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will take place at 7:30pm, November 9th 2024 at Bangkok Kunsthalle. Tickets are free but are limited to 50 seats due to space, book your ticket following the link in our bio!

Jazz and decolonization are entwined in this historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

It is 1961, six months after the admission of sixteen newly independent African countries to the UN, a political earthquake that shifts the majority vote from the colonial powers to the Global South. As Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe in indignation at the UN’s complicity in the overthrow of Lumumba, the US State Department swings into action by sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup.

The 31st of October marks the closing of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s ‘nostalgia for unity’.

Join us and the artist for a Closing Reception and a Collective Haunting for Halloween from 6pm to 10pm on October 31st 2024 supported by Bangkok City City. 

Image Credits: Abichon Rattanabhayon and Atsadawut Khawprasert

Join Nova Contemporary and Bangkok Kunsthalle for a conversation between Cole Lu and Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific, supported by Asymmetry Art Foundation, at Tate.

The event will take place next to Lu’s previous studio at Bangkok Kunsthalle, where he was artist-in-residence. His completed works will be on view at the Museum and Library of the Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 (BAB2024): Nurture Gaia, from October 24, 2024, to February 25, 2025.

The two will examine Lu’s engagement with materiality, alchemical processes, and writing. They will explore themes including portals and travel, and the interplay between exile, diaspora, and history. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session.

This event is supported by the Culture Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Thailand.

In partnership with Nova Contemporary, Bangkok Kunsthalle proudly hosted Cole Lu as its artist in residence in October 2024. This residency underscores both organizations’ commitments to fostering creative dialogue within Thailand and Southeast Asia, while contributing to a wider global conversation of contemporary art.

Officially opened in early 2024, Bangkok Kunsthalle occupies the historic Thai Wattana Panich building, once a leading printing house that was razed by fire in 2001. The brutalist complex, with sections dating back over seven decades, lay abandoned for more than 20 years. In Lu’s hands, this space is reactivated as a vessel for creation.

Lu’s medium and background resonate deeply with the building’s history. Raised within a literary household, with a father who is a librarian for two universities, Lu’s relationship with books, stories, and the printed word has long been fertile ground for his work. His practice of pyrography, involving meticulously burnt wood panels and linen, also uses fire as a generative force, carrying the echoes of trauma, transformation, and renewal. Through his meditative and laborious process of burning, he traces the origins of storytelling and unites mythology and autobiography to create new narratives.

This residency will culminate in a site-specific installation at the Museum & Library of Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 (BAB2024): Nurture Gaia from October 24, 2024, to February 25, 2025.

The artist will participate in a discussion at Bangkok Kunsthalle with Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator of Asia-Pacific, supported by Asymmetry Art Foundation, at Tate, on October 22, 2024, from 2pm onwards.

Bangkok Kunsthalle presents ‘Working On The Imaginary Object’, a movement performance by our artist in residence Natalie Brück. The performance will take place on Saturday, September 7th 2024 at 4 pm at Bangkok Kunsthalle. The performance is free and tickets are not required.

In her piece, Natalie Brück, together with a group of performers, creates empty spaces, focusing on what happens between people. They appear to be working on something. Seemingly invisible objects become visible through the movements of the performers.

Collective action is a necessity. Structures become visible through action and are developed further in the process. Yet everyone has their own idea of the object. Everyone has their own questions.

How do we deal with abstract concepts and conflicts? Can we form a community capable of action, capable of responding flexibly and agilely to the situation and shape it through our actions?

Cultivating the Art of Working with Space by Chitti Kasemkitvatana, held on August 25th, ten projects were selected and presented in Bangkok Kunsthalle.

Each group of young curators focused on a range of subjects, including community, history, city development, reproduction, and ecology. These site-specific projects were further developed along with their research and proposed as an exhibition this past Monday.

Congratulations to the selected project, ‘Alien Press: This page is intentionally left blank,’ curated by YOONGLAI COLLECTIVE. Please stay tuned for the upcoming exhibition in 2025.

Thank you to all participants for their dedication and enthusiasm in developing these projects.

Special thanks to Bangkok Art and Culture Centre for organizing the workshop in collaboration with the Faculty of Painting Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University and Bangkok Kunsthalle

In collaboration with Bangkok 1899, Bangkok Kunsthalle presents “We don’t have many days”, a dance performance by James Gallego Olivo. The performance will take place on Tuesday, August 13th 2024 at 4:30 pm at Bangkok Kunsthalle. The performance is free and tickets are not required.

James Gallego Olivo is a movement practitioner and dancer based in London, who currently lectures at the London Contemporary Dance School. His work and research are heavily influenced by Hip Hop, which he blends with contemporary references and improvisation.

James’s residency and events are supported by Bangkok 1899, Creative Migration, Artsadmin and British Council Thailand’s Connections Through Culture program.

Photo Credit: Matteo Sabouraud

Artist talk and workshop hosted by our artist in residence Natalie Brück with Master degree students from the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University.

Natalie Brück (born 1989 in Saarlouis) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Her residency will culminate in a live performance at 4pm, September 7th 2024 at Bangkok Kunsthalle.

Stefano Rabolli Pansera: 

Today I am very pleased to bring together artists and friends from all over the world: Brazil, France, Scandinavia, Korea, and Thailand of course.

This is actually a great opportunity to exchange ideas and impressions about novel frameworks for art, how we can reconsider nature in a different way and move forward with a new perspective.

So I think it is a great opportunity to really open your heart and really talk about your impressions with the help of Haegue and Ernesto who are leading artists, initiators. 

Haegue Yang: 

I have heard of Khao Yai Art Forest for a while and I wanted to come and see what the heck was going on here.

I was curious. I think many people in Thailand’s art scene are also curious. But most of all I thought when I heard about it, it would make a lot of sense to involve the next generation. So here was the happy coincidence that Ernesto and I were invited to teach at Silpakorn University.

And Stefano yesterday informed us that there will be a kind of signal moment in September of 2024. I guess you will keep witnessing what's going on here. I mean we as international people come and go, you know, we are obsolete people. But you guys are local, leading the future.

So I wanted to hear more about your vision, your feeling or instinct about this kind of project, maybe not only the Khao Yai Art Forest, but also how culture and nature comes together and how it will come together more.

And what does this mean? I'm from the generation where the map of the world has been important, the so-called the generation of globalization. Globalization in the sense that the center of the world has been dismantled little by little.

It's not only about New York, London and Paris anymore but also emerging hubs such as Istanbul, Tokyo, Arabic cities, South African and South American cities, etcetera.

But I think for your generation, this mental map will also change.

Many of your senior artists can also confess about how we would adapt to the new time and orientation. I have to say it's very challenging, I don't know how many new things I can accommodate within my limited time, but at the same time, I'm an artist, you know, not a normal social being. So I somehow want to accommodate as much as possible.

At the same time, I have a huge doubt about how much we can really accommodate and be real witnesses of the time to come.

So that is a little bit of my introduction, be prepared that if the microphone goes to you, you have to speak.

Ernesto Neto: 

Sawasdee Krub, I'm very pleased to be here in this ring with all of you. We have been here for some weeks thinking about this space, Khao Yai Art Forest. 

So maybe we can begin with some singing.

So what should we sing, Haegue?

So let's try to do something like this: Khao Yai, Khao Yai, everybody together.

Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai. 

It's good because when we sing together we share our vibrations and when we sit together in a ring too.

I was thinking while Haegue was talking and we were sitting here and about the ring and about the construction that you guys are going to do here.

I think it's very good to have a ring. 

You can have a ring during the dry weather but you can have a ring also during the rainy weather so you can have maybe a round roof that people can sit under together and sing, make art together, dance together.

If you look around we see that all the trees are a ring, they are all round.

So I was thinking about these things, how to put art inside of nature, because most of the time we need to take nature out to put art there, much like nature had been taken out of here for us to be sitting here.

So it's a negotiation.

As we enter nature we are already interfering with it. So how can we understand nature to interfere in nature? This is one thing.

So the architecture I think needs to fill this nature and I think this round spirit

would be very good to build on. 

I remember a friend of mine in Africa who studied patterns of very ancient tribes with very sophisticated patterns that were studied by these people who studied chaos theory, fragmented geometry. 

And they had a space that was a kind of ring here that was mainly the house.

Then there was another ring here, another ring, another ring, another ring and you make a ring of rings, and it reminds me that as you guys are beginning to build that perhaps it could stem from this ring here. 

And another thing that I talked with Stefano and everybody else yesterday is if you're going to farm here, how are you going to farm? Because nowadays there is this concept of syntropic farming that this guy Ernest Goethe coined, he really liked this phrase, “farming peace”. And you don't need to make just corn or just rice in his point of view. You can have many things together, you know, living together and growing together and this makes them stronger. Then somebody was talking about the tea that's made in the forest, that becomes a better tea. So I think this is worth exploring.

Another thing is that I think this conversation, all the discussions and residencies that you guys are going to do, is very good.

Installing art is a complicated thing, but it's necessary too because we make art and the art is a pot of knowledge that is spread through the relationship with the people.

But I personally have a very difficult time with forever things. I understand temporary things as being more alive, because the idea of trying to fix something forever I think is pretentious, nothing is forever. Even a stone with time, it erodes. But if you can have areas where some people can put some art for one day, then it goes away. Get inside the bush and have a rounder space where people can place art. Or someone can do something special more specifically in another place where there's no emptiness inside of the forest.

Or another thing that I thought, many times when we think of art in a landscape, we think of big things. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be big, because for it to be big, we need big spaces in nature which in turn requires more interference. So how do we dance and how do we place this art? Because today we can talk with the public through the art, not the artist. 

In my opinion, I think a great idea in the near future is to reconnect ourselves to nature, because there is a strong cut with the development of human society against nature. In Brazilian, this development we call “disinvolvement”. So to develop as a society, we negate, disengage ourselves with nature. 

Michel Auder: 

It's really interesting to see the students that are here, they are the future. I'm learning just by looking at the students. I can see them, they want to know. They are interested in the process and I think this project also involves students. That's also very important because of course you're the one that will keep the garden growing. Everything I could say would be repeating what I've been hearing with more clarity than I can express it. I work more after the fact rather than now so I don't really explain my life all the time or our life now. So I'm learning here and I'm really glad to be here and especially with the students. Thank you.

Michael Elmgreen: 

Being an artist who started out in the nineties, we spoke a lot about the big guilt of permanent works, because it was connected to a certain macho practice,

like big scarring in nature that would be permanent.

But then I think it went into the notion that if it's not so permanent, it's good,

which I also disagree with, because I think sometimes permanent works

are indicating a commitment that is different from objects that just disintegrate over time.

I mean, if you erect a temple, it's meant to be forever. It's not meant to be for three months or half a year. It's something you commit to.

And therefore often when you see, especially outdoor sculpture parks that are more loose in the approach to installing the works, the work is intended to disintegrate, it looks quite terrible after a while, because things are not maintained in the right way. And then when people come from outside and experience it, it's not in such a good state. So I would say, I don't think permanent is bad if it's the right kind of work. 

Also, if we speak about a farming project with ecological prospects, that would take maybe at least 10 years to function, then it also indicates a certain degree

of permanent attitudes towards being in truth, including in nature. Because of course, no matter how nice and spiritual and well-meaning we are, we are scarring nature when we go into nature. So let's make a nice tattoo if we are going to scar nature.

Ernesto Neto:

In terms of permanence or impermanence, I don't think the work should be deteriorating. Take care of the work for the time they stay. Can be five years, ten years, three months, one century. But take care of it. 

If you don't take care, there's a lot of temples that you go to that are ruins. You have to take care. 

You have no space to renovate for the new generations. To do so, you're going to have to get a new land, to have something. So you can have some things permanent, in my opinion. But it's good to have space for transitory things. Because life keeps going on. These guys are 20, 25 years old. But tomorrow they're going to be 50. And there's going to be other 25 year old guys. So you have your family. You're going to have your grandsons. Life keeps going on.

I agree with what Michael said. Sometimes you have something that really fits well in a space that is good to have for a long time. So it's a balance of the situation, because you begin to want everything forever. 

And making pavilions and these kinds of things. You begin to have no nature anymore. Instead you have a garden, you know. 

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul:

How can we reconsider nature from soul or nature from body? The people that were born in the city still have a nature soul or not anymore? And the soul is not born with nature, how can we count that?

I think about this a lot.

Ernesto Neto: 

I think even if you are born in the city, there is nature inside of us.

There's a lot of cells in our bodies that are changing, we need to eat nature. 

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul:

Yeah, if we have an operation or something that represses our organs from nature, what do we call that? 

I think because nature is nature, nature is all around us. When we pretend or try to make something natural, I'm not sure that it's still nature or it's something that we make to be, or pretend to be, or fake to be.

Ernesto Neto:

You know that for the indigenous in Brazil, at least for most of them word nature doesn't exist. Because every time we say nature, we put nature outside of us.

They have the tree and they have the name for each tree because it's a being, like a parent, like family. 

Still, there is this natural arrogance of our human society with trying to control nature.

Haegue Yang:

I just want to summarize a little bit. I think this discussion is not supposed to be black and white, it's not temporary versus permanent. However I think temporality as a topic is worth thinking about whether the action taking place here is only about preservation or is more about generation, generating new ideas. Anything we do is limited if the action doesn't have the power of a visionary behind it. Otherwise it would end up as just one of numerous anonymous attempts. 

We want to have an impact, we want each of our actions to have power, not political power but the power to inspire, exemplary power to give a good energy to our neighbors. The ability to extend over the time of history, over the geography. It would serve as an example for other countries in the region where the rural environment is more dominant than the urban environment and where new types of lifestyle are aspired to instead of following the urban lifestyle in already industrialized countries. It has to be a very generative model instead of tracing what has happened. 

There have been a lot of attempts at creating a generative model and I think the majority of them fall into two different traps and one is the very entertaining kind of art park like an outdoor sculpture in nature. The other model is more like regeneration of degraded cities or areas where depopulation is a social problem. Here art serves to heal. 

I think this is an older and maybe more conservative model and the second model of generating has been more recent. I think I want to move a bit more into the very concrete model, for instance Ernesto knows the model Inochim in Belo Horizonte where outdoor sculpture has been accumulated in one area and I know a little bit about Naoshima where art and culture was invited to regenerate the the island against the depopulation for the regeneration but both maybe is big or is and becoming a model to get over. 

So here comes what I wanted to say I think that's already what Ernesto said that there should be some evidential, physical model taking place but at the same time if those actions are only physical without knowledge of production or generating, gathering, sharing energy or exchanging ideas I think it will be completely meaningless for me. So both physical, evidential action is important as much as the knowledge production which is what contemporary art always has aspired to achieve. 

Art has always been jumping into the unknown. I know it sounds like a very big thing but I think a lot of people fear and respect art because we always jump into something unknown without knowing, so that knowledge production is something unknown but I think we should also jump into that.

And the way Michael described the commitment and continuity I think is another quality that we should pay attention to. Commitment not only in the physical and temporal way but also in the seriousness and the awareness about how visionary or insightful one has to be.

That's a little bit of summary so far. What I think we could do now is to really pass the microphone to everyone. 

Marisa Chearavanont: 

First of all, this is actually very surreal to me because when I came to this forest on the first day it was actually love at the first sight. Not because this area and forest is beautiful, I've been to many other places that are even more beautiful but for me just walking on the pine leaves carpet made me feel like: This is Thailand.

I'm very much a city person. I didn't really explore nature before but then COVID really changed me. I think COVID changed part of my DNA. Believe it or not, my focus, my life, a lot of things changed during COVID and what is important in my life. I'm more of a giver than a taker. I'm much more happy to give than receive. So I always thought, being in Thailand, what can I do for society and I thought about culture and art, things I am familiar with. How can I implement something here that can be used to connect the Thai art scene or Thai artists or architects and the emerging generation.

This area is not beautiful and magnificent nature. It's very humble. In the end it is humble because it was actually invaded by humans.

So when you walk and then when you're looking at it the trees are not as big or thick as in the National Park. 

Next to it they have beautiful waterfalls and beautiful trees but here it's not what that means it's you know this very much represents the nature humans exploit and here nature was exploited as part of rural living. 

So this area used to dwelled by the people from Nakon Rachasima. In 1972 there was a huge flood and the people had to escape from their hometown and the government decided to give free land for them to live because of the flood.  They decided to go higher up the mountain and cut all the trees in order to farm the land. Their main crops were tapioca and corn which doesn’t provide huge earnings. That's how they were living for several decades. 

At one point the government decided to acknowledge the community as residents and gave them ownership of the land. So once they had owned the land the first thing they did was to sell the land and return to the their hometown so that's why this area was deserted. Since then many foreign and invasive species of flora have invaded this horticultural habitat. 

During COVID my family and I were staying not far from here for six months. It wasn't that easy for me to stay stuck in one house with 22 family members, having breakfast, lunch and dinner together every single day, especially since most of them are my in-laws.

So it was it was nice in the beginning but then after a while I have to do work for Chef Cares and for other projects. With all the back-to-back Zoom meetings, I felt like, my God, this is so stressful. I realized that the only thing that can maintain my sanity was walking the field, the forest and that I realised how beautiful the wildflowers were.

You know all my life the flowers that I’ve seen are cut flowers and now I realised that the wildflowers are so beautiful and very fragrant. But what I learned is to cut the wildflowers and then put it into the vase. But they never lasted long. So the lesson that I learnt was that wildflowers have to stay in the wild. They don’t last because it was the best when stay in the wild. So walking in nature provided a lot of healing for me. This made me think, why don't I provide this kind of feeling to other people too.

You know, I wasn't that much of a nature person, but I realized that nature is very powerful. We all learnt how powerful nature is and how fragile human beings are during COVID.

So if I have some kind of opportunity, if I have some kind of space where we can share things, we can actually be inspired by nature. Not only nature, but nature as a medium. 

But all of us have to be engaged. How should we go into nature to inspire others and inspire us, but also build a kind of community. This I cannot do alone.

I'm just sowing the very beginning of the seed, but I really need all of you, all the communities internationally or even in the Khao Yai region to come and share your own experience, your own vision and your own passion.

Mark Chearavanont: 

A lot of questions keep arising from this discussion in my head, I think I may be thinking more conceptually, but I'm curious from the artist’s perspective, if you think, or how you think we can use art as a tool to integrate, or maybe reintroduce humanity back into nature in a way, and whether that's even a worthwhile operation.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about maybe instead of integration with nature, a sort of reverence, respect for nature might be a better way of thinking about it. In that sense, if we look back to ancient cultures, the way we kind of interact with nature, one way is very practical, maybe like hunting and gathering, but also ritual, in terms of the sacred, I think rituals act as a kind of conduit between us and nature, and I'm just thinking about how through architecture and art, we can reflect some of those concepts.

Haegue Yang:

You disguise your thought as a question, but you said that it's supposed to be a question to the artists. 

Actually, you expressed the necessity to be very interdisciplinary in this situation. The designer, artist, thinker and architect need to collaborate, otherwise, we cannot tackle this very holistic mission.

One general consideration is how to get over the dialectics between urban and rural, much like the tension between temporality and permanence.

This notion was integrated in your comment– this holistic thinking, that it is native to this region, needs to be regenerated. Maybe we don't only regenerate nature, but also the holistic thinking to overcome the Western dialectics.

I know it's a very big philosophical question, but I also think it's worth considering because we are all somehow brought up in environments with a clear center and periphery. There was a major and minor; it was very binary situation. But now we are facing a period that requires us to think and act in non-binary ways and multiple ways.

There is a French philosopher who coined the word singular-plural as one word. You know, singular and plural used to be binary, and he coined the word singular-plural as one word.

We cannot give up individuality, singularity and subjectivity, but we also can’t stop being in a plural way, a desire to belong to a community and think for the public. How can I make it shareable? And that's the seed for the domain of the public, right?

This is a very naturalistic way, the cultivation, culture, what human beings have done so far. But ironically enough, that cultivation is a way to step closer to the notion of nature. I'm curious what you will continue to do as a younger generation and I would like to observe this. 

Ernesto Neto:

So I think Mark said something that for me is very important, is this thing of ritualizing things and rituals more broadly.

So if you're going to open a path in the middle of the forest, it's good to ritualize it, to sing, to dance, to pray, whatever you want to do, the way you want to do it and how to do it depends on each one of us. It can be in a Buddhist way, it can be in a personal way, it can be in an artistic way.

But I think it's very good if you can ritualize every step of this. And I even can invite an artist to organize the ceremony, to open a path, to begin the architecture, to put the art in the place. I think it's something that can be good that he brought up. 

For the indigenous people in Brazil, the issue of not touching nature in national parks is very critical. They have a spiritual connection with nature. The Amazon did not just grow naturally, there were many indigenous people who cultivated the land. They have a profound connection to the natural world, in fact, in their culture, the word nature does not exist. It seems like nature to us, absolutely untouched by humanity, but they offer a different perspective on ways existing as human beings. 

PuPla Kaewprasert: 

Hi, so our names are Pu and Pla but you can call us PuPla at the same time.

So I'll start with a sentence which I'll come back to later which is: the forest for us is a mode of experience; it's not a space, it's not a place. I'll leave it at that and I'll come back. 

I'll start with a circle as opposed to a straight line. A straight line is a product of civilisation. And when we have this straight line, we have the separation between nature and culture, between human and non-human, good and bad. But this dichotomy is actually not part of nature, there is no pure nature. And actually we really like this word coined by Bruno Latour which is nature and culture as one word: nature-culture. So for us, we don't believe in this separation. 

Recently we had a walk with Allor who is a member of the Akha, a huge hill tribe in Chiang Rai. As we walked and talked he said the Akha people use slash and burn agriculture as a way of living. It's about hunting and gathering. It's not about cultivation. Their philosophy literally translates to: I eat up everything, not a single tree left. Then we move to civilisation. At first I thought, because we were so naive, that it was a mistranslation because Thai is not his first language. So I thought maybe he misused the word civilisation in Thai. But then now I’ve realised that many societies indigenous to Amazonia also recognise the nature of the forest as “urban heritage”. The word for the forest and natural habitat is actually the village and town. And these tribal communities address a stream or a tree exactly the same way as how we would address a monument, a building, an architecture or any built thing. So now I realised that for them, there is no nature. For them, the forest is a civilisation, it is a form of culture. So what we see as nature is actually the product of that straight line, which is created or dominated by cultures and humanity. 

PuPla Kaewprasert: 

Even the way we are sitting here in this planted teak forest, you can see all the

teak trees are not that big and also they are all in grids. When we walked up into the mountain, the forest was introduced as a kind of original form of nature which obviously was not original but it has been untouched for a while and the plants have regrown. But actually for us nature is not about how to define what is nature and how to reverse it because it doesn't matter we don't have to reverse it back, we don't have to separate humans because we cannot but it's all about how to live with it. 

Like Ernesto mentioned we have to understand nature to interact with it, to

interrupt it, this understanding of nature is what we call naturalness. It is not only about nature, it doesn't have to be natural. Everything has its own naturalness, to find the naturalness in things is to understand their propensity then interact with them. There’s also this notion by a post-humanist theorist, Karen Barad, where they do not use the word interact because to interact is to create a hierarchy where humans are dominant and then the thing becomes passive. Instead she proposed the term intra-act which implies a kind of parity between the maker and the objects. 

It's more like a collaborative work, so instead of working on an object to transform it, both the maker and the object collaborate to displace it. Because of course whatever has been done, just like walking into a forest, we have already disrupted it. But intra-acting with naturalness displaces not transforms, we do not dominate or change them to our perception or preconception but allowing them to co-making with us. This is what we are really interested in. 

For example, we are really interested in woodworking, but not only how to work with wood, also how to work with the naturalness of wood. The question is how to find the naturalness of wood while working on it, how to work without dominating the material we are working with. There is no point in separating makers from wood because wood has to be worked, it has to be sawn, it has to be planed, it has to be sanded. It is a product of making. It is more about how to work with wood while still fully respecting it or listening to it. This is what we mean to collaborate, to intra-act with the naturalness of wood. Making is multidirectional, maker is not the only one who makes, wood too is one of the makers.

PuPla Kaewprasert:

We’d like to end with this most misused or misunderstood quote by Henry David Thoreau, which is “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

This notion became the ignition point of the national park movement in the US. So that marked the beginning of the movement of people trying to conserve the “wilderness” not the “wildness” of forests.

Their conception of preservation is to freeze it in a single moment, but the forest is forever evolving.

So actually, what Thoreau meant by that sentence is that, for him, wildness is an attitude. It's an absolute freedom.

And that's why I will return to the first sentence. So for us, the forest is a mode of experience. It can be anywhere. It can be in the market. It can be in town. It's how you perceive the environment, how you experience things that you are surrounded by and how to interact with objects and things around us.

I'm going to end not with a solution, but a way for us to experience nature: when we go into the forest, we should walk with our eyes and see with our hands and feet. 

Haegue Yang:

Mountains are a very Asian way of viewing nature from the outside. I think it's interesting to put the two words, mountain and forest, and then oscillate in and out. Sometimes we have to walk out and bring our ideas about nature into urbanity to think and popularize them, but really we have to be inside nature and experience it. 

I just wanted to comment on this oscillation of in and out.

And also, I don't know, it was just by chance that when I conceived the wallpaper in Chiang Rai, one of the main motifs was actually the forest, and especially the motif to see the forest from inside, and then looking straight up where heaven is broken down with the leaves and the trees. And that's the perspective that I have never really been acquainted with. That was very foreign to me. I was a mountain person. But I was always outside of it, philosophically contemplating the notion of the mountain from a distance. But all of a sudden, I had the thoughts about entering inside it. 

Therefore, I was looking for the motif, this broken down heaven through the notion of forest that actually marks our position, which is inevitably inside of something. Yeah, just a very interesting thought.

Thank you.

PuPla Kaewprasert:

We spent quite a lot of time in forests. We had more than a few field research in forested areas, and also we spent some time in a temple in a forest in Kanchanaburi, quite close to the border to Burma. And the experience of the forest is so different from what the inside we understand as opposed to the outside.

If we go back to the interventions, we can't really go into the forest without intervention. So we either follow a path or we create a new path. And so this path is

actually a representation of movement, of repetition. But another thing that can represent the movement in the forest is the wind. And this wind, the movement of the canopies with the winds is actually defined, what is inside and outside. So we were walking in the forest during the typhoon season and a heavy rain was

about to fall. Suddenly we could hear the sounds of branches cracking and breaking and the thunder approaching. Everything sounded very, very loud. But it never reached us because we were inside. Because we were covered by a thick canopy. So this experience disrupted what we were familiar with. You see something, you hear something. You hear the wind and expect the wind to come. But it never came. And when we came out, everyone in the village was very worried about us, because they thought that we were caught up in the storm. But we weren’t, we didn't even realise.

So when we came out, we saw all the branches, all the leaves on the ground. So we realised, okay, there was a strong wind for real. We didn't get tricked, but because we were protected by the thick foliage, it was a very nice experience. You could make out the directions of the wind just by the movement of the foliage. Okay, you hear it, it's coming this way, but it's not yet here. It was quite nice because you could visualise the wind, something you usually can't see.

But with the foliage it was quite a nice experience to be in it. So that was one of the times we experienced the inside. 

From the outside, it was another story. When we came out, everyone was so worried, because they were outside, seeing everything happen from the outside. And that was the outside perspective. 

Vichaya Mukdamanee: 

I came here yesterday trying not to be a teacher. I'm trying to be one of the students and one of the colleagues, it is truly a privilege to learn from all of you. But during the course of this trip there were three things that I could not get out of my head.

The first is one place in Thailand, it's called Suan Mok which I already showed to Stefano. It's actually a public space where people can go and learn meditation. It's in the southern part of Thailand and has been around for more than 40 years. There is one space like this with large rocks and they called it the church. So basically it's a recreation of a Buddhist temple in a natural site.

The reason I'm thinking about this is even though I’ve never been there, there is another place called Suan Mok as well but it's the Bangkok branch.

So people built Suan Mok in Bangkok in the park and I once had an exhibit in that space.

I showed my work in that space and so I have been thinking about the idea of fake and real, original and non-original, forest and park, where should we be and why shouldn't we be here or there. All these questions are in my mind. You know, maybe because I'm a city boy. I've grown up in the city most of my life.

The second thing I keep thinking about is a nearby waterfall in the Khao Yai area. I’ve stopped by the site of the waterfall many times with my family, but I was never able to really appreciate the waterfall. This is because whenever I get there, it is always filled with crowds of people sitting and eating on the shore of the waterfall with lots of cars parked and I always felt like “Let's move on, don't stop here it's not natural enough.”

But these past two days I kept finding myself thinking about it and I questioned myself thinking how can I not consider the waterfall natural? Because you know many waterfalls in Thailand have become like this, a community space where people go and feel nature. It's a place where community life and nature mingle.

And so I keep thinking about this and in comparison to this site or the future of this site, how would it compare to that waterfall? 

The third thing that I have been thinking about is time. 

If I go to the forest, I get lost. I cannot differentiate the forest. If I walk this way with no path, I will just come back very soon, you know. I just cannot leave myself there for so long. But when I am here, I feel that time moves differently and when we leave this natural space, we return to the time and pace that we are familiar with, but I don’t feel like the pace we live our lives is very sustainable. 

I think with the world today, the pace of the natural world will be gone and so I would like to learn about time. I would like to learn about the pace that we find here, the pace that is not produced. Not only learn about, but also learn from. I don't know if it's going to be the future or not, but that's what interests me the most.

Stefano Rabolli Pansera:

First of all, thank you because this is an extraordinary moment of germination of ideas and so many beautiful observations were expressed today.

I will start with the simplest, but also my favorite moment of the trip. My favorite moment in the entire workshop is right now with this round table in the forest.

It reminds me of a beautiful observation by Louis Kahn when he was asked what is a school, what is the architecture of a school? He said “The school is like two people meeting under the shade of a tree.”

He really had this extraordinary capacity to really go to the origin of space and of communal gathering, where we all see each other’s faces because we are in a circle. This is the best way to really show the true purpose of these art forests.  Because the art forest is first and foremost a pedagogical model. 

Pu and Pla said before that the forest is a state of mind. It's an attitude, it's not really a physical object, and it's not really about planting trees around. It’s how we relate to nature and we overtake the dichotomy between nature and culture, between subject and object.

And what we're doing here is already a form of architecture in itself. We don't really have to do much more than that. And there are actually interesting questions coming out of this dialogue because we don't build architecture, in a way, we plant architecture. For example, the model of farming is a model of cultivating nature, which is actually a new form of architecture. A form of architecture which is not about imposing a form, but letting things grow. 

Letting things grow even engages with a different temporality.

[Mark] brought up two things, the notion of ritualization and the reverence of nature. Ritual would be proposing daily actions in eternal mechanics, because everything is repeated and this actually mirrors how nature functions– the changing of seasons, the cycle of farming. 

So what is the architecture of this space? It's not meant to just happen once, but actually it is meant to be repeated over and over. And in this sense we touch upon what Michael said before, what is temporary and what is permanent.

I mean this roundtable is temporary, but by reenacting rituals like this all the time, we can really keep it alive. 

To switch our mindset to think of cultivating a tree, planting a tree and taking care of it, rather than simply constructing, which I think opens a very interesting perspective. 

The second one was really about the reverence of nature. Gustav Mahler once said that tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire, which is true because it's not really about preserving something. Preserving and exploiting are two faces of the same attitude when we consume, because we are not able to use things anymore.

Now we are using this path, sitting within this ring of trees, which is completely artificial because it was not happening naturally before. But by using it and by domesticating it, we are actually able to find a new model where we are not destroying, but we are actually turning it in our advantage to really create an ecosystem where we can feel at home, where we can really feel comfortable. And how we articulate this dialogue is actually the biggest challenge. 

Today I think this conversation has given us a very interesting direction.

It's actually not by thinking about nature and architecture. Earlier today with Haegue, we were talking about planning. But the act of planning is already the beginning of the problem, because in the moment when you start thinking about nature, we already see it as an animal, as a mountain, which is outside us. 

The only way to be productive is through direct action, by doing what we did today; by acting, directing nature and reacting locally to the specific conditions that we have. We use the path that we found, we found the spot in the shade where we can find the most suitable accommodation. 

So it is not about creating an overreaching plan which is imposed, but it is about finding a local solution that allows us to dwell in a different way.

Thank you very much, this conversation has been very inspiring!

Participants

Haegue Yang

Ernesto Neto

Michel Auder

Michael Elmgreen

Vichaya Mukdamanee

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Michelle Wang Yi Yi

​​Lili Kemper

Young-Jun Tak 

Marisa Chearavanont

Stefano Rabolli Pansera

Mark Chearavanont

Sooin Kim

Elle Cherin Kim

Lauren Haelynn Kim

Pu and Pla Kaewprasert

Gemmica Sinthawalai

Supatchar Rojanavani

Tippanya Somjitr

Sorrathan Auykham

Kittipat Kotchatanod

Poompitak Chontong

Pongputarn Thamdee

Natttapat Lampoon

Thanakarn Klannakhon

Jirasak Homhem

Transcribed by Mark Chearavanont

Forest Circle is a performative and interspersed symposium in a forest setting. It embarks on a quest to disclose the forest as a mode of experience and a method of learning in an immersive condition amidst things at play: a full and particular engagement between the experiencing subjects and their surroundings. The forest setting sheds new light on how we perceive and make sense of everything around and inside us, which is usually dismissed and bypassed as the misalignment of the well-categorised world driven by intelligibility. It is a site where knowledge is not a product of any higher cognitive process but is brought together by the very action of our bodily involvement in an environment. As Eduardo Kohn urges us to observe that “… seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.” The symposium gathers voices to form collaborative dialogues not only among participants but also with the surroundings. Everything present is an active producer as well as a modifier. It is no longer sure who or what is speaking or what we are listening to, the surroundings or what is offered. The conversation arises accumulatively through incidental and ambivalent perception in situ. Simultaneously, we co-exist both in the world of discourse and the world out there. The conversation aims to fracture dominant projections, stable interpretations, and cultural expectations, allowing new perspectives, new connections and new affects to emerge. To undertake this, the gathering invites its guests to re-suspend learning at the threshold of the encounters between seeing and unseeing, hearing and unhearing, doing and undoing. It unveils certain kinds of forest that may be marginal to centric views, something too silent to be heard, too dark to be seen, or too passive to be aware of. 

Speakers 
Doreen Bernath
Nop Katawat
Pu Kaewprasert
Pla Kaewprasert
Taratawan Krue-On

Bangkok Kunsthalle in collaboration with Doc Club present the Thai premiere of “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” by Johan Grimonprez, winner of the Special Jury Award for “Cinematic Innovation” at 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will take place at 7:30pm, November 9th 2024 at Bangkok Kunsthalle. Tickets are free but are limited to 50 seats due to space, book your ticket following the link in our bio!

Jazz and decolonization are entwined in this historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

It is 1961, six months after the admission of sixteen newly independent African countries to the UN, a political earthquake that shifts the majority vote from the colonial powers to the Global South. As Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe in indignation at the UN’s complicity in the overthrow of Lumumba, the US State Department swings into action by sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup.

The 31st of October marks the closing of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s ‘nostalgia for unity’.

Join us and the artist for a Closing Reception and a Collective Haunting for Halloween from 6pm to 10pm on October 31st 2024 supported by Bangkok City City. 

Image Credits: Abichon Rattanabhayon and Atsadawut Khawprasert

Join Nova Contemporary and Bangkok Kunsthalle for a conversation between Cole Lu and Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific, supported by Asymmetry Art Foundation, at Tate.

The event will take place next to Lu’s previous studio at Bangkok Kunsthalle, where he was artist-in-residence. His completed works will be on view at the Museum and Library of the Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 (BAB2024): Nurture Gaia, from October 24, 2024, to February 25, 2025.

The two will examine Lu’s engagement with materiality, alchemical processes, and writing. They will explore themes including portals and travel, and the interplay between exile, diaspora, and history. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session.

This event is supported by the Culture Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Thailand.

In partnership with Nova Contemporary, Bangkok Kunsthalle proudly hosted Cole Lu as its artist in residence in October 2024. This residency underscores both organizations’ commitments to fostering creative dialogue within Thailand and Southeast Asia, while contributing to a wider global conversation of contemporary art.

Officially opened in early 2024, Bangkok Kunsthalle occupies the historic Thai Wattana Panich building, once a leading printing house that was razed by fire in 2001. The brutalist complex, with sections dating back over seven decades, lay abandoned for more than 20 years. In Lu’s hands, this space is reactivated as a vessel for creation.

Lu’s medium and background resonate deeply with the building’s history. Raised within a literary household, with a father who is a librarian for two universities, Lu’s relationship with books, stories, and the printed word has long been fertile ground for his work. His practice of pyrography, involving meticulously burnt wood panels and linen, also uses fire as a generative force, carrying the echoes of trauma, transformation, and renewal. Through his meditative and laborious process of burning, he traces the origins of storytelling and unites mythology and autobiography to create new narratives.

This residency will culminate in a site-specific installation at the Museum & Library of Abbots of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 (BAB2024): Nurture Gaia from October 24, 2024, to February 25, 2025.

The artist will participate in a discussion at Bangkok Kunsthalle with Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator of Asia-Pacific, supported by Asymmetry Art Foundation, at Tate, on October 22, 2024, from 2pm onwards.

Bangkok Kunsthalle presents ‘Working On The Imaginary Object’, a movement performance by our artist in residence Natalie Brück. The performance will take place on Saturday, September 7th 2024 at 4 pm at Bangkok Kunsthalle. The performance is free and tickets are not required.

In her piece, Natalie Brück, together with a group of performers, creates empty spaces, focusing on what happens between people. They appear to be working on something. Seemingly invisible objects become visible through the movements of the performers.

Collective action is a necessity. Structures become visible through action and are developed further in the process. Yet everyone has their own idea of the object. Everyone has their own questions.

How do we deal with abstract concepts and conflicts? Can we form a community capable of action, capable of responding flexibly and agilely to the situation and shape it through our actions?

Cultivating the Art of Working with Space by Chitti Kasemkitvatana, held on August 25th, ten projects were selected and presented in Bangkok Kunsthalle.

Each group of young curators focused on a range of subjects, including community, history, city development, reproduction, and ecology. These site-specific projects were further developed along with their research and proposed as an exhibition this past Monday.

Congratulations to the selected project, ‘Alien Press: This page is intentionally left blank,’ curated by YOONGLAI COLLECTIVE. Please stay tuned for the upcoming exhibition in 2025.

Thank you to all participants for their dedication and enthusiasm in developing these projects.

Special thanks to Bangkok Art and Culture Centre for organizing the workshop in collaboration with the Faculty of Painting Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University and Bangkok Kunsthalle

In collaboration with Bangkok 1899, Bangkok Kunsthalle presents “We don’t have many days”, a dance performance by James Gallego Olivo. The performance will take place on Tuesday, August 13th 2024 at 4:30 pm at Bangkok Kunsthalle. The performance is free and tickets are not required.

James Gallego Olivo is a movement practitioner and dancer based in London, who currently lectures at the London Contemporary Dance School. His work and research are heavily influenced by Hip Hop, which he blends with contemporary references and improvisation.

James’s residency and events are supported by Bangkok 1899, Creative Migration, Artsadmin and British Council Thailand’s Connections Through Culture program.

Photo Credit: Matteo Sabouraud

Artist talk and workshop hosted by our artist in residence Natalie Brück with Master degree students from the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University.

Natalie Brück (born 1989 in Saarlouis) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Her residency will culminate in a live performance at 4pm, September 7th 2024 at Bangkok Kunsthalle.

Stefano Rabolli Pansera: 

Today I am very pleased to bring together artists and friends from all over the world: Brazil, France, Scandinavia, Korea, and Thailand of course.

This is actually a great opportunity to exchange ideas and impressions about novel frameworks for art, how we can reconsider nature in a different way and move forward with a new perspective.

So I think it is a great opportunity to really open your heart and really talk about your impressions with the help of Haegue and Ernesto who are leading artists, initiators. 

Haegue Yang: 

I have heard of Khao Yai Art Forest for a while and I wanted to come and see what the heck was going on here.

I was curious. I think many people in Thailand’s art scene are also curious. But most of all I thought when I heard about it, it would make a lot of sense to involve the next generation. So here was the happy coincidence that Ernesto and I were invited to teach at Silpakorn University.

And Stefano yesterday informed us that there will be a kind of signal moment in September of 2024. I guess you will keep witnessing what's going on here. I mean we as international people come and go, you know, we are obsolete people. But you guys are local, leading the future.

So I wanted to hear more about your vision, your feeling or instinct about this kind of project, maybe not only the Khao Yai Art Forest, but also how culture and nature comes together and how it will come together more.

And what does this mean? I'm from the generation where the map of the world has been important, the so-called the generation of globalization. Globalization in the sense that the center of the world has been dismantled little by little.

It's not only about New York, London and Paris anymore but also emerging hubs such as Istanbul, Tokyo, Arabic cities, South African and South American cities, etcetera.

But I think for your generation, this mental map will also change.

Many of your senior artists can also confess about how we would adapt to the new time and orientation. I have to say it's very challenging, I don't know how many new things I can accommodate within my limited time, but at the same time, I'm an artist, you know, not a normal social being. So I somehow want to accommodate as much as possible.

At the same time, I have a huge doubt about how much we can really accommodate and be real witnesses of the time to come.

So that is a little bit of my introduction, be prepared that if the microphone goes to you, you have to speak.

Ernesto Neto: 

Sawasdee Krub, I'm very pleased to be here in this ring with all of you. We have been here for some weeks thinking about this space, Khao Yai Art Forest. 

So maybe we can begin with some singing.

So what should we sing, Haegue?

So let's try to do something like this: Khao Yai, Khao Yai, everybody together.

Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai, Khao Yai. 

It's good because when we sing together we share our vibrations and when we sit together in a ring too.

I was thinking while Haegue was talking and we were sitting here and about the ring and about the construction that you guys are going to do here.

I think it's very good to have a ring. 

You can have a ring during the dry weather but you can have a ring also during the rainy weather so you can have maybe a round roof that people can sit under together and sing, make art together, dance together.

If you look around we see that all the trees are a ring, they are all round.

So I was thinking about these things, how to put art inside of nature, because most of the time we need to take nature out to put art there, much like nature had been taken out of here for us to be sitting here.

So it's a negotiation.

As we enter nature we are already interfering with it. So how can we understand nature to interfere in nature? This is one thing.

So the architecture I think needs to fill this nature and I think this round spirit

would be very good to build on. 

I remember a friend of mine in Africa who studied patterns of very ancient tribes with very sophisticated patterns that were studied by these people who studied chaos theory, fragmented geometry. 

And they had a space that was a kind of ring here that was mainly the house.

Then there was another ring here, another ring, another ring, another ring and you make a ring of rings, and it reminds me that as you guys are beginning to build that perhaps it could stem from this ring here. 

And another thing that I talked with Stefano and everybody else yesterday is if you're going to farm here, how are you going to farm? Because nowadays there is this concept of syntropic farming that this guy Ernest Goethe coined, he really liked this phrase, “farming peace”. And you don't need to make just corn or just rice in his point of view. You can have many things together, you know, living together and growing together and this makes them stronger. Then somebody was talking about the tea that's made in the forest, that becomes a better tea. So I think this is worth exploring.

Another thing is that I think this conversation, all the discussions and residencies that you guys are going to do, is very good.

Installing art is a complicated thing, but it's necessary too because we make art and the art is a pot of knowledge that is spread through the relationship with the people.

But I personally have a very difficult time with forever things. I understand temporary things as being more alive, because the idea of trying to fix something forever I think is pretentious, nothing is forever. Even a stone with time, it erodes. But if you can have areas where some people can put some art for one day, then it goes away. Get inside the bush and have a rounder space where people can place art. Or someone can do something special more specifically in another place where there's no emptiness inside of the forest.

Or another thing that I thought, many times when we think of art in a landscape, we think of big things. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be big, because for it to be big, we need big spaces in nature which in turn requires more interference. So how do we dance and how do we place this art? Because today we can talk with the public through the art, not the artist. 

In my opinion, I think a great idea in the near future is to reconnect ourselves to nature, because there is a strong cut with the development of human society against nature. In Brazilian, this development we call “disinvolvement”. So to develop as a society, we negate, disengage ourselves with nature. 

Michel Auder: 

It's really interesting to see the students that are here, they are the future. I'm learning just by looking at the students. I can see them, they want to know. They are interested in the process and I think this project also involves students. That's also very important because of course you're the one that will keep the garden growing. Everything I could say would be repeating what I've been hearing with more clarity than I can express it. I work more after the fact rather than now so I don't really explain my life all the time or our life now. So I'm learning here and I'm really glad to be here and especially with the students. Thank you.

Michael Elmgreen: 

Being an artist who started out in the nineties, we spoke a lot about the big guilt of permanent works, because it was connected to a certain macho practice,

like big scarring in nature that would be permanent.

But then I think it went into the notion that if it's not so permanent, it's good,

which I also disagree with, because I think sometimes permanent works

are indicating a commitment that is different from objects that just disintegrate over time.

I mean, if you erect a temple, it's meant to be forever. It's not meant to be for three months or half a year. It's something you commit to.

And therefore often when you see, especially outdoor sculpture parks that are more loose in the approach to installing the works, the work is intended to disintegrate, it looks quite terrible after a while, because things are not maintained in the right way. And then when people come from outside and experience it, it's not in such a good state. So I would say, I don't think permanent is bad if it's the right kind of work. 

Also, if we speak about a farming project with ecological prospects, that would take maybe at least 10 years to function, then it also indicates a certain degree

of permanent attitudes towards being in truth, including in nature. Because of course, no matter how nice and spiritual and well-meaning we are, we are scarring nature when we go into nature. So let's make a nice tattoo if we are going to scar nature.

Ernesto Neto:

In terms of permanence or impermanence, I don't think the work should be deteriorating. Take care of the work for the time they stay. Can be five years, ten years, three months, one century. But take care of it. 

If you don't take care, there's a lot of temples that you go to that are ruins. You have to take care. 

You have no space to renovate for the new generations. To do so, you're going to have to get a new land, to have something. So you can have some things permanent, in my opinion. But it's good to have space for transitory things. Because life keeps going on. These guys are 20, 25 years old. But tomorrow they're going to be 50. And there's going to be other 25 year old guys. So you have your family. You're going to have your grandsons. Life keeps going on.

I agree with what Michael said. Sometimes you have something that really fits well in a space that is good to have for a long time. So it's a balance of the situation, because you begin to want everything forever. 

And making pavilions and these kinds of things. You begin to have no nature anymore. Instead you have a garden, you know. 

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul:

How can we reconsider nature from soul or nature from body? The people that were born in the city still have a nature soul or not anymore? And the soul is not born with nature, how can we count that?

I think about this a lot.

Ernesto Neto: 

I think even if you are born in the city, there is nature inside of us.

There's a lot of cells in our bodies that are changing, we need to eat nature. 

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul:

Yeah, if we have an operation or something that represses our organs from nature, what do we call that? 

I think because nature is nature, nature is all around us. When we pretend or try to make something natural, I'm not sure that it's still nature or it's something that we make to be, or pretend to be, or fake to be.

Ernesto Neto:

You know that for the indigenous in Brazil, at least for most of them word nature doesn't exist. Because every time we say nature, we put nature outside of us.

They have the tree and they have the name for each tree because it's a being, like a parent, like family. 

Still, there is this natural arrogance of our human society with trying to control nature.

Haegue Yang:

I just want to summarize a little bit. I think this discussion is not supposed to be black and white, it's not temporary versus permanent. However I think temporality as a topic is worth thinking about whether the action taking place here is only about preservation or is more about generation, generating new ideas. Anything we do is limited if the action doesn't have the power of a visionary behind it. Otherwise it would end up as just one of numerous anonymous attempts. 

We want to have an impact, we want each of our actions to have power, not political power but the power to inspire, exemplary power to give a good energy to our neighbors. The ability to extend over the time of history, over the geography. It would serve as an example for other countries in the region where the rural environment is more dominant than the urban environment and where new types of lifestyle are aspired to instead of following the urban lifestyle in already industrialized countries. It has to be a very generative model instead of tracing what has happened. 

There have been a lot of attempts at creating a generative model and I think the majority of them fall into two different traps and one is the very entertaining kind of art park like an outdoor sculpture in nature. The other model is more like regeneration of degraded cities or areas where depopulation is a social problem. Here art serves to heal. 

I think this is an older and maybe more conservative model and the second model of generating has been more recent. I think I want to move a bit more into the very concrete model, for instance Ernesto knows the model Inochim in Belo Horizonte where outdoor sculpture has been accumulated in one area and I know a little bit about Naoshima where art and culture was invited to regenerate the the island against the depopulation for the regeneration but both maybe is big or is and becoming a model to get over. 

So here comes what I wanted to say I think that's already what Ernesto said that there should be some evidential, physical model taking place but at the same time if those actions are only physical without knowledge of production or generating, gathering, sharing energy or exchanging ideas I think it will be completely meaningless for me. So both physical, evidential action is important as much as the knowledge production which is what contemporary art always has aspired to achieve. 

Art has always been jumping into the unknown. I know it sounds like a very big thing but I think a lot of people fear and respect art because we always jump into something unknown without knowing, so that knowledge production is something unknown but I think we should also jump into that.

And the way Michael described the commitment and continuity I think is another quality that we should pay attention to. Commitment not only in the physical and temporal way but also in the seriousness and the awareness about how visionary or insightful one has to be.

That's a little bit of summary so far. What I think we could do now is to really pass the microphone to everyone. 

Marisa Chearavanont: 

First of all, this is actually very surreal to me because when I came to this forest on the first day it was actually love at the first sight. Not because this area and forest is beautiful, I've been to many other places that are even more beautiful but for me just walking on the pine leaves carpet made me feel like: This is Thailand.

I'm very much a city person. I didn't really explore nature before but then COVID really changed me. I think COVID changed part of my DNA. Believe it or not, my focus, my life, a lot of things changed during COVID and what is important in my life. I'm more of a giver than a taker. I'm much more happy to give than receive. So I always thought, being in Thailand, what can I do for society and I thought about culture and art, things I am familiar with. How can I implement something here that can be used to connect the Thai art scene or Thai artists or architects and the emerging generation.

This area is not beautiful and magnificent nature. It's very humble. In the end it is humble because it was actually invaded by humans.

So when you walk and then when you're looking at it the trees are not as big or thick as in the National Park. 

Next to it they have beautiful waterfalls and beautiful trees but here it's not what that means it's you know this very much represents the nature humans exploit and here nature was exploited as part of rural living. 

So this area used to dwelled by the people from Nakon Rachasima. In 1972 there was a huge flood and the people had to escape from their hometown and the government decided to give free land for them to live because of the flood.  They decided to go higher up the mountain and cut all the trees in order to farm the land. Their main crops were tapioca and corn which doesn’t provide huge earnings. That's how they were living for several decades. 

At one point the government decided to acknowledge the community as residents and gave them ownership of the land. So once they had owned the land the first thing they did was to sell the land and return to the their hometown so that's why this area was deserted. Since then many foreign and invasive species of flora have invaded this horticultural habitat. 

During COVID my family and I were staying not far from here for six months. It wasn't that easy for me to stay stuck in one house with 22 family members, having breakfast, lunch and dinner together every single day, especially since most of them are my in-laws.

So it was it was nice in the beginning but then after a while I have to do work for Chef Cares and for other projects. With all the back-to-back Zoom meetings, I felt like, my God, this is so stressful. I realized that the only thing that can maintain my sanity was walking the field, the forest and that I realised how beautiful the wildflowers were.

You know all my life the flowers that I’ve seen are cut flowers and now I realised that the wildflowers are so beautiful and very fragrant. But what I learned is to cut the wildflowers and then put it into the vase. But they never lasted long. So the lesson that I learnt was that wildflowers have to stay in the wild. They don’t last because it was the best when stay in the wild. So walking in nature provided a lot of healing for me. This made me think, why don't I provide this kind of feeling to other people too.

You know, I wasn't that much of a nature person, but I realized that nature is very powerful. We all learnt how powerful nature is and how fragile human beings are during COVID.

So if I have some kind of opportunity, if I have some kind of space where we can share things, we can actually be inspired by nature. Not only nature, but nature as a medium. 

But all of us have to be engaged. How should we go into nature to inspire others and inspire us, but also build a kind of community. This I cannot do alone.

I'm just sowing the very beginning of the seed, but I really need all of you, all the communities internationally or even in the Khao Yai region to come and share your own experience, your own vision and your own passion.

Mark Chearavanont: 

A lot of questions keep arising from this discussion in my head, I think I may be thinking more conceptually, but I'm curious from the artist’s perspective, if you think, or how you think we can use art as a tool to integrate, or maybe reintroduce humanity back into nature in a way, and whether that's even a worthwhile operation.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about maybe instead of integration with nature, a sort of reverence, respect for nature might be a better way of thinking about it. In that sense, if we look back to ancient cultures, the way we kind of interact with nature, one way is very practical, maybe like hunting and gathering, but also ritual, in terms of the sacred, I think rituals act as a kind of conduit between us and nature, and I'm just thinking about how through architecture and art, we can reflect some of those concepts.

Haegue Yang:

You disguise your thought as a question, but you said that it's supposed to be a question to the artists. 

Actually, you expressed the necessity to be very interdisciplinary in this situation. The designer, artist, thinker and architect need to collaborate, otherwise, we cannot tackle this very holistic mission.

One general consideration is how to get over the dialectics between urban and rural, much like the tension between temporality and permanence.

This notion was integrated in your comment– this holistic thinking, that it is native to this region, needs to be regenerated. Maybe we don't only regenerate nature, but also the holistic thinking to overcome the Western dialectics.

I know it's a very big philosophical question, but I also think it's worth considering because we are all somehow brought up in environments with a clear center and periphery. There was a major and minor; it was very binary situation. But now we are facing a period that requires us to think and act in non-binary ways and multiple ways.

There is a French philosopher who coined the word singular-plural as one word. You know, singular and plural used to be binary, and he coined the word singular-plural as one word.

We cannot give up individuality, singularity and subjectivity, but we also can’t stop being in a plural way, a desire to belong to a community and think for the public. How can I make it shareable? And that's the seed for the domain of the public, right?

This is a very naturalistic way, the cultivation, culture, what human beings have done so far. But ironically enough, that cultivation is a way to step closer to the notion of nature. I'm curious what you will continue to do as a younger generation and I would like to observe this. 

Ernesto Neto:

So I think Mark said something that for me is very important, is this thing of ritualizing things and rituals more broadly.

So if you're going to open a path in the middle of the forest, it's good to ritualize it, to sing, to dance, to pray, whatever you want to do, the way you want to do it and how to do it depends on each one of us. It can be in a Buddhist way, it can be in a personal way, it can be in an artistic way.

But I think it's very good if you can ritualize every step of this. And I even can invite an artist to organize the ceremony, to open a path, to begin the architecture, to put the art in the place. I think it's something that can be good that he brought up. 

For the indigenous people in Brazil, the issue of not touching nature in national parks is very critical. They have a spiritual connection with nature. The Amazon did not just grow naturally, there were many indigenous people who cultivated the land. They have a profound connection to the natural world, in fact, in their culture, the word nature does not exist. It seems like nature to us, absolutely untouched by humanity, but they offer a different perspective on ways existing as human beings. 

PuPla Kaewprasert: 

Hi, so our names are Pu and Pla but you can call us PuPla at the same time.

So I'll start with a sentence which I'll come back to later which is: the forest for us is a mode of experience; it's not a space, it's not a place. I'll leave it at that and I'll come back. 

I'll start with a circle as opposed to a straight line. A straight line is a product of civilisation. And when we have this straight line, we have the separation between nature and culture, between human and non-human, good and bad. But this dichotomy is actually not part of nature, there is no pure nature. And actually we really like this word coined by Bruno Latour which is nature and culture as one word: nature-culture. So for us, we don't believe in this separation. 

Recently we had a walk with Allor who is a member of the Akha, a huge hill tribe in Chiang Rai. As we walked and talked he said the Akha people use slash and burn agriculture as a way of living. It's about hunting and gathering. It's not about cultivation. Their philosophy literally translates to: I eat up everything, not a single tree left. Then we move to civilisation. At first I thought, because we were so naive, that it was a mistranslation because Thai is not his first language. So I thought maybe he misused the word civilisation in Thai. But then now I’ve realised that many societies indigenous to Amazonia also recognise the nature of the forest as “urban heritage”. The word for the forest and natural habitat is actually the village and town. And these tribal communities address a stream or a tree exactly the same way as how we would address a monument, a building, an architecture or any built thing. So now I realised that for them, there is no nature. For them, the forest is a civilisation, it is a form of culture. So what we see as nature is actually the product of that straight line, which is created or dominated by cultures and humanity. 

PuPla Kaewprasert: 

Even the way we are sitting here in this planted teak forest, you can see all the

teak trees are not that big and also they are all in grids. When we walked up into the mountain, the forest was introduced as a kind of original form of nature which obviously was not original but it has been untouched for a while and the plants have regrown. But actually for us nature is not about how to define what is nature and how to reverse it because it doesn't matter we don't have to reverse it back, we don't have to separate humans because we cannot but it's all about how to live with it. 

Like Ernesto mentioned we have to understand nature to interact with it, to

interrupt it, this understanding of nature is what we call naturalness. It is not only about nature, it doesn't have to be natural. Everything has its own naturalness, to find the naturalness in things is to understand their propensity then interact with them. There’s also this notion by a post-humanist theorist, Karen Barad, where they do not use the word interact because to interact is to create a hierarchy where humans are dominant and then the thing becomes passive. Instead she proposed the term intra-act which implies a kind of parity between the maker and the objects. 

It's more like a collaborative work, so instead of working on an object to transform it, both the maker and the object collaborate to displace it. Because of course whatever has been done, just like walking into a forest, we have already disrupted it. But intra-acting with naturalness displaces not transforms, we do not dominate or change them to our perception or preconception but allowing them to co-making with us. This is what we are really interested in. 

For example, we are really interested in woodworking, but not only how to work with wood, also how to work with the naturalness of wood. The question is how to find the naturalness of wood while working on it, how to work without dominating the material we are working with. There is no point in separating makers from wood because wood has to be worked, it has to be sawn, it has to be planed, it has to be sanded. It is a product of making. It is more about how to work with wood while still fully respecting it or listening to it. This is what we mean to collaborate, to intra-act with the naturalness of wood. Making is multidirectional, maker is not the only one who makes, wood too is one of the makers.

PuPla Kaewprasert:

We’d like to end with this most misused or misunderstood quote by Henry David Thoreau, which is “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

This notion became the ignition point of the national park movement in the US. So that marked the beginning of the movement of people trying to conserve the “wilderness” not the “wildness” of forests.

Their conception of preservation is to freeze it in a single moment, but the forest is forever evolving.

So actually, what Thoreau meant by that sentence is that, for him, wildness is an attitude. It's an absolute freedom.

And that's why I will return to the first sentence. So for us, the forest is a mode of experience. It can be anywhere. It can be in the market. It can be in town. It's how you perceive the environment, how you experience things that you are surrounded by and how to interact with objects and things around us.

I'm going to end not with a solution, but a way for us to experience nature: when we go into the forest, we should walk with our eyes and see with our hands and feet. 

Haegue Yang:

Mountains are a very Asian way of viewing nature from the outside. I think it's interesting to put the two words, mountain and forest, and then oscillate in and out. Sometimes we have to walk out and bring our ideas about nature into urbanity to think and popularize them, but really we have to be inside nature and experience it. 

I just wanted to comment on this oscillation of in and out.

And also, I don't know, it was just by chance that when I conceived the wallpaper in Chiang Rai, one of the main motifs was actually the forest, and especially the motif to see the forest from inside, and then looking straight up where heaven is broken down with the leaves and the trees. And that's the perspective that I have never really been acquainted with. That was very foreign to me. I was a mountain person. But I was always outside of it, philosophically contemplating the notion of the mountain from a distance. But all of a sudden, I had the thoughts about entering inside it. 

Therefore, I was looking for the motif, this broken down heaven through the notion of forest that actually marks our position, which is inevitably inside of something. Yeah, just a very interesting thought.

Thank you.

PuPla Kaewprasert:

We spent quite a lot of time in forests. We had more than a few field research in forested areas, and also we spent some time in a temple in a forest in Kanchanaburi, quite close to the border to Burma. And the experience of the forest is so different from what the inside we understand as opposed to the outside.

If we go back to the interventions, we can't really go into the forest without intervention. So we either follow a path or we create a new path. And so this path is

actually a representation of movement, of repetition. But another thing that can represent the movement in the forest is the wind. And this wind, the movement of the canopies with the winds is actually defined, what is inside and outside. So we were walking in the forest during the typhoon season and a heavy rain was

about to fall. Suddenly we could hear the sounds of branches cracking and breaking and the thunder approaching. Everything sounded very, very loud. But it never reached us because we were inside. Because we were covered by a thick canopy. So this experience disrupted what we were familiar with. You see something, you hear something. You hear the wind and expect the wind to come. But it never came. And when we came out, everyone in the village was very worried about us, because they thought that we were caught up in the storm. But we weren’t, we didn't even realise.

So when we came out, we saw all the branches, all the leaves on the ground. So we realised, okay, there was a strong wind for real. We didn't get tricked, but because we were protected by the thick foliage, it was a very nice experience. You could make out the directions of the wind just by the movement of the foliage. Okay, you hear it, it's coming this way, but it's not yet here. It was quite nice because you could visualise the wind, something you usually can't see.

But with the foliage it was quite a nice experience to be in it. So that was one of the times we experienced the inside. 

From the outside, it was another story. When we came out, everyone was so worried, because they were outside, seeing everything happen from the outside. And that was the outside perspective. 

Vichaya Mukdamanee: 

I came here yesterday trying not to be a teacher. I'm trying to be one of the students and one of the colleagues, it is truly a privilege to learn from all of you. But during the course of this trip there were three things that I could not get out of my head.

The first is one place in Thailand, it's called Suan Mok which I already showed to Stefano. It's actually a public space where people can go and learn meditation. It's in the southern part of Thailand and has been around for more than 40 years. There is one space like this with large rocks and they called it the church. So basically it's a recreation of a Buddhist temple in a natural site.

The reason I'm thinking about this is even though I’ve never been there, there is another place called Suan Mok as well but it's the Bangkok branch.

So people built Suan Mok in Bangkok in the park and I once had an exhibit in that space.

I showed my work in that space and so I have been thinking about the idea of fake and real, original and non-original, forest and park, where should we be and why shouldn't we be here or there. All these questions are in my mind. You know, maybe because I'm a city boy. I've grown up in the city most of my life.

The second thing I keep thinking about is a nearby waterfall in the Khao Yai area. I’ve stopped by the site of the waterfall many times with my family, but I was never able to really appreciate the waterfall. This is because whenever I get there, it is always filled with crowds of people sitting and eating on the shore of the waterfall with lots of cars parked and I always felt like “Let's move on, don't stop here it's not natural enough.”

But these past two days I kept finding myself thinking about it and I questioned myself thinking how can I not consider the waterfall natural? Because you know many waterfalls in Thailand have become like this, a community space where people go and feel nature. It's a place where community life and nature mingle.

And so I keep thinking about this and in comparison to this site or the future of this site, how would it compare to that waterfall? 

The third thing that I have been thinking about is time. 

If I go to the forest, I get lost. I cannot differentiate the forest. If I walk this way with no path, I will just come back very soon, you know. I just cannot leave myself there for so long. But when I am here, I feel that time moves differently and when we leave this natural space, we return to the time and pace that we are familiar with, but I don’t feel like the pace we live our lives is very sustainable. 

I think with the world today, the pace of the natural world will be gone and so I would like to learn about time. I would like to learn about the pace that we find here, the pace that is not produced. Not only learn about, but also learn from. I don't know if it's going to be the future or not, but that's what interests me the most.

Stefano Rabolli Pansera:

First of all, thank you because this is an extraordinary moment of germination of ideas and so many beautiful observations were expressed today.

I will start with the simplest, but also my favorite moment of the trip. My favorite moment in the entire workshop is right now with this round table in the forest.

It reminds me of a beautiful observation by Louis Kahn when he was asked what is a school, what is the architecture of a school? He said “The school is like two people meeting under the shade of a tree.”

He really had this extraordinary capacity to really go to the origin of space and of communal gathering, where we all see each other’s faces because we are in a circle. This is the best way to really show the true purpose of these art forests.  Because the art forest is first and foremost a pedagogical model. 

Pu and Pla said before that the forest is a state of mind. It's an attitude, it's not really a physical object, and it's not really about planting trees around. It’s how we relate to nature and we overtake the dichotomy between nature and culture, between subject and object.

And what we're doing here is already a form of architecture in itself. We don't really have to do much more than that. And there are actually interesting questions coming out of this dialogue because we don't build architecture, in a way, we plant architecture. For example, the model of farming is a model of cultivating nature, which is actually a new form of architecture. A form of architecture which is not about imposing a form, but letting things grow. 

Letting things grow even engages with a different temporality.

[Mark] brought up two things, the notion of ritualization and the reverence of nature. Ritual would be proposing daily actions in eternal mechanics, because everything is repeated and this actually mirrors how nature functions– the changing of seasons, the cycle of farming. 

So what is the architecture of this space? It's not meant to just happen once, but actually it is meant to be repeated over and over. And in this sense we touch upon what Michael said before, what is temporary and what is permanent.

I mean this roundtable is temporary, but by reenacting rituals like this all the time, we can really keep it alive. 

To switch our mindset to think of cultivating a tree, planting a tree and taking care of it, rather than simply constructing, which I think opens a very interesting perspective. 

The second one was really about the reverence of nature. Gustav Mahler once said that tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire, which is true because it's not really about preserving something. Preserving and exploiting are two faces of the same attitude when we consume, because we are not able to use things anymore.

Now we are using this path, sitting within this ring of trees, which is completely artificial because it was not happening naturally before. But by using it and by domesticating it, we are actually able to find a new model where we are not destroying, but we are actually turning it in our advantage to really create an ecosystem where we can feel at home, where we can really feel comfortable. And how we articulate this dialogue is actually the biggest challenge. 

Today I think this conversation has given us a very interesting direction.

It's actually not by thinking about nature and architecture. Earlier today with Haegue, we were talking about planning. But the act of planning is already the beginning of the problem, because in the moment when you start thinking about nature, we already see it as an animal, as a mountain, which is outside us. 

The only way to be productive is through direct action, by doing what we did today; by acting, directing nature and reacting locally to the specific conditions that we have. We use the path that we found, we found the spot in the shade where we can find the most suitable accommodation. 

So it is not about creating an overreaching plan which is imposed, but it is about finding a local solution that allows us to dwell in a different way.

Thank you very much, this conversation has been very inspiring!

Participants

Haegue Yang

Ernesto Neto

Michel Auder

Michael Elmgreen

Vichaya Mukdamanee

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Michelle Wang Yi Yi

​​Lili Kemper

Young-Jun Tak 

Marisa Chearavanont

Stefano Rabolli Pansera

Mark Chearavanont

Sooin Kim

Elle Cherin Kim

Lauren Haelynn Kim

Pu and Pla Kaewprasert

Gemmica Sinthawalai

Supatchar Rojanavani

Tippanya Somjitr

Sorrathan Auykham

Kittipat Kotchatanod

Poompitak Chontong

Pongputarn Thamdee

Natttapat Lampoon

Thanakarn Klannakhon

Jirasak Homhem

Transcribed by Mark Chearavanont