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The fourth Thailand Biennale, on view across Phuket, looks beyond the island’s leisure economy
\n\n\n\nIn the statement for the fourth Thailand Biennale, a lyrical description of sundown at Promthep Cape on Phuket’s southernmost tip segues into an equally colourful rundown of the living things that abide by this daily occurrence – ‘coastal villagers stop weaving their fishing nets’, ‘cabaret performers paint their faces for a show’, ‘dugongs graze in the seagrass beds’. By dint of kalpa, a Sanskrit term referring to a day in the life of the Hindu creator-god Brahma (4.32 billion human years), it then calls for a cessation of this ‘succession of mundane spectacles’, and ends with the promise of ‘new ways of sharing time, a time that is not one’.
\n\n\n\nAs earnest biennial setups go, it’s an enticing one: we are primed for a show that seeks to disrupt the continuum of an island known globally for its leisure economy and tropical-paradise image, but not a lot else. Certainly not self-enquiry or art. And yet, for those at the opening, the curatorial team’s alignment of Eternal [Kalpa] with a subjective time that ‘does not align with the temporal flow of the physical world or the designs of institutions’ seemed to have been taken a tad too literally – some artists were still installing work as the press tour arrived. The delays were disheartening, and protracted, but certainly added a layer of metatextuality to proceedings, especially cocurator Hera Chan’s claims that Eternal [Kalpa] is a ‘decentralising gesture’. Had Phuket’s ‘island time’ been slowed by Bangkok’s ‘bureaucratic time’? (The biennale is funded by a division of the government’s culture ministry.) Or was it the other way round? Wherever the blame lay, the situation served to embroil punctual visitors in all the talk of ‘diverse tempos’.
\n\n\n\nWith works dispersed across 19 venues in and around the provincial town, from failed commercial buildings to Sino-Portuguese mansions, no artwork stands as Eternal [Kalpa]’s entry point or opener. However, a new iteration of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s installation IS YOUR TIME (2017/2024), staged in the darkened arena of Phuket’s municipal gymnasium, hits like one: a piano surrounded by a pool of water and an overhead projection of falling snowflakes defies the march of ‘modern clock time’. Ringing out sporadically is a single note generated by seismic data sourced from around the world – and a felt-covered metal finger mechanism perched above each key. Given that the piano was salvaged from a school in Miyagi Prefecture devastated by Japan’s 2011 tsunami, and that the even deadlier Indian Ocean tsunami hit Phuket on Boxing Day in 2004, the associations it, and the 4,000 empty stadium seats surrounding it, conjures are raw. But it also functions as a sort of metronome; the long, irregular pauses between notes introduce a decelerated pace and spur a deep listening that complements the earthbound nature of other works.
\n\n\n\nThe majority are new commissions that represent, and call for, slow engagement with Phuket’s lesser-known histories and habitats. In the gymnasium’s other rooms, these include Chatpong Chuenrudeemol and Eakapob Huangthanapan’s MOTO-BAGADS: Urak Lawoi Resilience as a Vehicle for Adaptive Commons (2025), a display of speculative architecture – such as a giant, latticed bamboo shelter modelled on the sai (fish trap) – created in collaboration with a Urak Lawoi sea-nomad community being forced to adjust, due to land-rights conflicts and national-park regulations, to life on land. A short walk away, Eiji Sumi’s Whisper of the Forest (2025) comprises mounted LED lights dotted along a winding path through a mangrove forest. The work draws on animism and tree ordinations practised by Buddhist monks but, with each freestanding light radiating a gently modulating, UFO-like glow, also seems to express the idea that to understand the true predicament of nature requires a close watching of, or strange enmeshment with it.
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This resonance recurs at other points, particularly Pearl Bowl, a derelict bowling alley. In two towering videos by Noémie Goudal, Super Strata and Grand Vide (both 2024), photocollages of paradise – a cave, a jungly cove framed by limestone karsts – crumble, melt and peel before our eyes, and with all the gracelessness of old fly posters or crumbling stage sets. Forming a more baroque statement on accelerated environmental change is a new video by Riar Rizaldi. Screened at an old liquor distillery, Badak (2025) is a hammy, B-movie-style mythography that blurs the legacy of Java’s tin-mining history with that of Phuket’s – an industry that brought wealth but ended during the 1980s. Memorably, it also intertwines the intra-island theme of mining with the themes of animal extinction and tourism: towards the end, a female tourist with the legs of an endangered Javan Rhino repeats the word ‘entropy’ five times, then trudges slowly through the tourist-filled streets of Phuket’s old town.
\n\n\n\nThis biennale proves no less adept at exploring the aesthetics and realities of tourism, the industry Thailand increasingly relies upon as a driver of its ailing economy – but which poses an existential threat to many of its marine and terrestrial ecologies. On the brighter side of things, Manila-based fashion studio TOQA’s Like the sun, I love the sky (2025) features rooms of hung batik clothing and fabric made by local artisans using mangosteen dyes. Expanding on this inviting scenography is a sumptuous short film that plays into holiday brochure archetypes, as courting lovers walking through Phuket, and a group staring out across a cliff edge, model these outfits inspired by local ‘Peranakan’ heritage (a blend of Hokkien Chinese, Malay and Thai influence). Accompanied by the forlorn sounds of an old Thai love song, the work sits between wistful melodrama and performative branding exercise – a connotation extended by the fact that the biennale’s docents are wearing TOQA’s functional yet exotic uniforms.
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The carefully constructed sense of place and nostalgia conjured by TOQA’s sun-burnished cinematic world is given a reality check elsewhere, especially at Pearl Theatre, a former adult entertainment centre where trompe l’oeil murals attesting to its most recent incarnation as a tourist attraction alternate with works about the island’s nighttime economy and sex industry. Highlights include Imhathai Suwatthanasilp’s anatomically suggestive bikinis and burlesque outfits, woven out of wigs donated by trans performers from the famous Simon Cabaret (Foxy Diva Hot Pink Lacegina Queen, 2025), and Oat Montien’s mock queer nightclub (Pearl Boy Operating Theater, 2025), which, with its oysters tied in kinbaku knots near a glitzy operating chair and flashing disco lights, draws a parallel between the plight of sex workers and pearl cultivation. Both convey a sense of the daily reinvention demanded, and prompt consideration of a pleasure industry that monetises instant gratification while slowly grinding down bodies.
\n\n\n\nIf subverting Phuket’s staged images and gifting tourists with a rich, embodied understanding of its truth, or truths, lies at the heart of this edition (and, empirically as well as rhetorically, it does), the etherealisation of its Chinese diasporic history proves to be yet another effective technique. At a 200-year-old Taoist shrine (said to be the birthplace of the world famous Phuket Vegetarian Festival and its self-mutilation rituals), for example, Serene Hui’s multimedia display Tiger’s Head, Nail’s Tail (2025) draws upon the experiences of her one-hundred-two-year-old grandfather, who worked as a transcriber of qiaopi (the ‘silver letters’ migrant workers sent back to China). Their presentation alongside archive images – not to mention a panoramic view of Kathu, a Phuket district largely built by Hokkien and Teochew immigrants – makes for one of this tardy yet stimulating biennale’s most transporting evocations. Through our processing of these fragments, many of them contemporaneous with Kathu Shrine’s heyday as a spiritual and social hub for the Chinese workforce, something of the sacrifice and stoicism, and regimented daily cycle, that made Phuket the economic dynamo it is today emerges. ‘Husband works diligently, his duty in the tin mines is laborious,’ writes one migrant in a letter from 1955, before continuing: ‘But all is well, don’t worry about us. Time rushes onward.’
\n\n\n\nThailand Biennale: Eternal [Kalpa], various venues, Phuket, through 30 April 2026
\n\n\n\nFrom the Spring 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
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