Alicja Kwade’s Pars pro Toto (2020) in the museum’s courtyard. Courtesy of Dib Bangkok. Photographer Auntika Ounjittichai, 2025

IT WAS HARD TO GET HERE reads a painted vinyl and plywood bench created by Finnegan Shannon and situated past the entryway of Dib Bangkok. It provides an abbreviated backstory behind a new museum that opened in the Thai capital in late December—the first of its kind in the city and the country. Stability is something the Thai art scene has lacked, and the museum’s launch marks a significant structural shift. “For the general arts scene here, the ecosystem is fast developing,” Miwako Tezuka, director of the museum, told Observer. “What we need is constancy.”

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Located in a converted industrial warehouse designed by WHY Architecture (the same firm behind the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the museum takes its name from the Thai word “dib,” meaning “raw” or “natural, authentic state.” The institution’s holdings are comprised of the private art collection of Thai businessman Petch Osathanugrah, amassed over the course of three decades before his death in 2023. It comprises around 1,000 works by some 200 artists, more or less equally divided between Asian and non-Asian origins. “There was no institution presenting a space that allows local artists and global artists to have equal ground [in] conversation,” Tezuka added, contextualizing the importance of the museum.

The debut exhibition, “(In)visible Presence” (on view through August 3, 2026), is a meditation on memory curated by Ariana Chaivaranon. “It’s so important for local artists to see how they’re in dialogue with something that’s so much bigger than the nation or what’s going on right now in Thailand,” she told Observer. “These artists are all deeply intertwined with an international conversation. And yet, so often in Thailand, we only have a conversation internally, which is partly because of the collections that have been on display.” The mise-en-scène at Dib Bangkok reflects that these practices developed in different geographical regions, but Chaivaranon insisted that........

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