Your ultimate guide to Bangkok

Chiang Mai has done it again – and not to anybody’s surprise. Today, the Time Out world’s 20 best cities for art and culture in 2026 list has dropped, and our city made the cut.  Quizzing over 24,000 urbanites across over 150 cities to rank the best cities on the planet for music, art, theatre and more, Time Out set out to find today’s cultural capitals – places where art, theatre, music and cultural all come together in a way that’s accessible and affordable to locals and visitors alike.  Combined with insight from Time Out’s culture panel – editors, writers and local experts – the highest-scoring cities for each country were selected. And we’re hardly surprised Chiang Mai made it to the list. Sitting at a respectable 19 on the list, Chiang Mai received particularly strong approval for its festival scene from Thai locals. Of those we surveyed, 75 percent gave the city a high rating for the quality of its arts scene, and 73 percent said culture is affordable. Founded some 700 years ago, Buddhist art, temples and cultural evolution frame the city’s identity, but there’s a lot more to Chiang Mai’s ‘culture’ than murals and stupas. Around the city, you can find countless gallery exhibitions, indie studios and creative neighbourhoods – Pong Noi area being one of our faves – all popping up alongside longstanding craft traditions, while initiatives like Chiang Mai Festival City are turning the calendar into a near year-round programme of events. And the timing couldn’t be better. This weekend is the city’s most auspicious ‘city pillar’ festival – locally known as the Inthakin Festival, that celebrates the foundation of the city in 1296.   

Treadmill runs get repetitive and the same playlists loop again and again. If motivation for exercise slips, Bangkok has a simple fix on May 14. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) teams up with Thairath to turn Chatuchak Park from regular green space to a lively open-air workout venue. It aims to get city residents moving again while easing work stress after long days at the office. Chatuchak Park usually draws weekend joggers and cyclists, but this evening shifts the focus towards shared movement and public participation. Photograph: BMA The park's aerobic activity zone becomes a large dance floor where fitness meets molam rhythm, led by professional instructors alongside mother Arpaporn 'Hi' Nakhonsawan. Easy-to-follow moves, plenty of laughter and a crowd that ranges from office workers to regular park-goers. Dress code stays open, so trainers, costumes or office shirts all fit right in. Live music elements and call-and-response instruction keep the atmosphere engaging while staying accessible for beginners and casual participants alike. Event highlights include: 5pm – Activity booths open, get your body warmed up and ready 5.40pm – The Bangkok Governor officially opens the event 6pm – Start of the ‘molum style’aerobic dance session led by professional instructors and Mae Arpaporn 'Hi' Nakhonsawan Booths line the space for light activities and quick wellness checks, so arrive early, warm up and stay a while after the session ends. Water stations sit nearby to keep everyone refreshed throughout the evening. Move your body, switch off from work thoughts and head home lighter in mood. At Aerobic Activity Area, Chatuchak Park. May 14 from 5pm onwards. Free entry.

After pulling in nearly 7,000 people last year, Bangkok World Music Day returns with bigger ambitions and a longer soundtrack. On Saturday June 13, the city hands over its afternoon and evening to more than 10 hours of live sets, all free and spread across two central spots: One Bangkok and Alliance Française Bangkok. View this post on Instagram A post shared by One Bangkok (@one_bangkok) More than 30 artists step in across five stages, with a programme that jumps from pop and indie to molam, hip-hop, jazz and electronic. The fun sits in the mix. Collaborative performances add another layer, especially on the electronic stage where Thai and international names share the decks. Photograph: worldmusicday.bkk The full line-up lands on May 19, though the shape of the day's already taking form. A ballroom segment brings voguing culture front and centre, with performances and walk-friendly energy that welcomes anyone keen to join the floor rather than just watch. Elsewhere, emerging musicians take to smaller corners for busking sessions, while a roaming food market keeps you well fed between sets. The idea traces back to Fête de la Musique, launched in France in 1982 and now marked in more than 120 countries. The premise stays simple: bring music out of concert halls and place it squarely in public life. Block out the day. Start early, stay late and let the city set the pace.  

The starting horn cuts through the dark, sharp and unmistakable, and suddenly the city shifts gears. Trainers slap the pavement in quick succession as runners stream through Bangkok's historic core in neon kits, old race tees and race-day shoes worn in just right –  proof that the city barely sleeps in the first place. Mark your calendar: the Bangkok Marathon 2026 returns on Sunday November 8 for its 37th outing. Every year, it pulls in everyone, from nervous first-timers testing their stamina to seasoned marathoners chasing a personal best, all moving through landmarks that look completely different before sunrise. Photograph: Bangkok Marathon Distances range from manageable to slightly unhinged, depending on your mood. 5 km – Fun Run 10 km – Mini Marathon 21.1 km – Half Marathon 42.195 km – Full Marathon Photograph: Bangkok Marathon The timings lean fully nocturnal, which only adds to the atmosphere. 11pm (Saturday November 7): arrival and check-in at Sanamchai Road Midnight: full marathon start 3am: half marathon start 4.30am: mini marathon start 5am: fun run start 7am: awards ceremony 8am: wrap-up Registration opens in June 2026 via here. If the thought has crossed your mind before, consider this your nudge.

As AI tightens its hold on daily life and the idea of success keeps shifting shape, the question starts to linger: what kind of life actually makes sense to keep chasing? Not the glossy version, not the one that looks good on paper, but something that fits. That question sits quietly at the centre of Think Fest: Everybody Changes, a three-day happening by BrandThink that turns Ari up as a walkable map of ideas, people and small discoveries. View this post on Instagram A post shared by BrandThink (@brandthink.me) Ari does a lot of the heavy lifting. This isn't just a strip of cafes or a checklist of viral spots. The neighbourhood has its own cadence, shaped over years by independent businesses, low-key studios and a community that quietly gets on with making things.  Across the weekend, that familiar landscape shifts slightly. ‘Creative hopping’ becomes the main activity, with venues across the area hosting everything from talks and exhibitions to workshops, live sets and casual meet-ups.  The collaborators give a sense of the range. Music labels like Loveis Entertainment and What The Duck bring their own crowd and sound, while Pantang Artwork – known for its behind-the-scenes work on films and series  adds a visual layer likely to spill beyond a standard gallery setup. View this post on Instagram A post shared by BrandThink (@brandthink.me) The programme splits across four modes, each offering a different way to take part: Think Mode: Small-group conversations that ditch the stage format for something closer and more honest. Speakers from different fields share working lives, turning points and how they make sense of a fast-changing world. Experience Mode: Exhibitions, workshops and installations scattered across Ari, encouraging you to move around and pick up inspiration in fragments rather than a single hit. Connect Mode: Community-led gatherings where locals, creatives and partners cross paths. Introductions, unexpected chats and the kind of networking that doesn't actually sting. Play Mode: Music, screenings and performances that carry the evening. Less about spectacle, more about keeping the energy going after dark. It suits anyone who's slightly adrift right now, or anyone who simply wants a different pace for a weekend. You don't need a grand plan or a clear goal. Turning up is enough. Give yourself a few hours, start near Air BTS Station (Exit 3), and see where your feet take you. One stop leads to another, and before long you're in a conversation you didn't expect or a space you might have missed on any other day. For those driving, parking is available here. Think Fest: Everybody Changes runs from May 29-31, 1pm-10pm, across Ari. Tickets go on sale from May 9 via RestSpace.  If the end of the month looks a bit empty, this fills it without trying too hard — just a neighbourhood, opened up slightly, and a chance to follow whatever version of life makes sense to you right now.

Lumphini Park keeps finding new ways to pull people in, from its Japanese-style dog park and Green Bridge to the always-packed Hawker Centre. But a few streets away, another green space has quietly reopened, skipping the fanfare in favour of a softer reset. Chalermprakiat Park 80th Anniversary of His Majesty the King (Sathorn) returns after a lengthy renovation, and the whole place clearly leans towards younger visitors. Children take over from the entrance onwards, darting between play areas while parents spread out nearby with snacks, mats and one eye on the action. Photograph: Greener Bangkok Photograph: Greener Bangkok It’s not especially large, but the layout works hard. A looping track gives joggers a quieter alternative to Lumphini, while compacted playgrounds keep younger visitors occupied for hours. Lawns open upjust enough for casual kickabouts and easy picnics, and shaded corners beneath the main structure double as breezy rest stops. Around the pond, benches face the water – proper spots for slowing down once the light starts to soften. Photograph: Greener Bangkok For Sathorn office workers, it lands as an easy lunchtime escape. Nearby residents, meanwhile, finally get their neighbourhood park back in proper form. Compared with the scale of Benjakitti Park, this one stays firmly on the intimate side, though that's part of the appeal. Mature rees and newly planted greenery scatter shade across the grounds, with flowers tucked along the paths. Kids' laughter carries through the park, giving the whole place an easy, lived-in rhythm.  Chalermprakiat Park 80th Anniversary of His Majesty the King (Sathorn) is open daily from 5am-9pm.

Right now, a growing number of Bangkok runners are chasing something far more persuasive: a free massage, an onsen soak or a glowing complexion. The city's quietly turned kilometres into currency, with brands swapping step counts for rewards that land somewhere between indulgence and discipline. Momentum, after all, rarely arrives with a grand gesture. It starts small. A few thousand steps. Besides getting your body moving, these campaigns also give you small goals that can motivate you to be a little more active. If you're looking for inspiration to start exercising again, these campaigns are a great place to begin. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Yunomori Onsen & Spa (@yunomori_onsen) Run your way to a soak at Yunomori Onsen & Spa A long day ends better in hot water. Yunomori's step-based rewards make that post-run ritual easier to justify. Clock 6,000 steps and the onsen pass drops by 20 percent. Double it to 12,000 and you're looking at a buy-one-get-one situation. Hit 20,000 and the soak comes free, which feels like the universe quietly applauding your effort. Campaign runs until May 29. If heat therapy isn't enough, hands-on relief waits nearby. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Healing House Clinic (@thehealinghouseclinic) Trade distance for downtime at The Healing House Clinic Five kilometres earns a 30-minute neck, shoulder and back massage – the exact areas that complain first after a run. Regular runners might opt for a sports treatment instead, but either way, the logic holds: move first, recover properly later. It's a simple exchange that keeps fatigue from piling up and makes the next outing less daunting. Available until June 30. For those who prefer a more layered approach, one clinic folds skincare and wellness together. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Facial Acupressure, Ultraformer, Botox, Filler, Skinbooster, PRP (@couture.wellnessclinic) Stack your rewards at Couture Wellness Clinic Here, distance scales dramatically. Five kilometres gets you a quick skin treatment. Ten upgrades the experience with a Kyungrak massage, a Korean technique known for lifting and tension release – plus another facial session. Push to 20 and the offering shifts gear entirely: PRP knee treatment, IV drip and a full massage. Campaign ends June 30. Beauty doesn't sit this one out either. View this post on Instagram A post shared by โปรแกรมBotox • Filler • Ultraformer • Oligio • Morpheus • Pico (@dahlia.clinic) Chase a glow at Dahlia Clinic ‘Run to Glow’ turns kilometres into cosmetic perks. Five earns a vitamin IV drip aimed at brighter skin. 10 adds laser hair removal, while 20 unlocks a more comprehensive treatment programme. Exercise becomes part of a broader self-care loop rather than a separate obligation. Running until May 31. Then comes the practical side of fitness: food. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ginzy Healthy & Delicious (@ginzy.ginzy) Refuel smartly with Ginzy For anyone counting macros or simply trying to eat better, Ginzy's rewards land right on cue. Five kilometres equals a blended chicken breast drink – surprisingly popular in the city's health circles. 10 adds an extra serving plus protein chips. Hit a half marathon distance at 21 and a full B999 healthy gift set comes your way. Campaign runs until May 31. Bangkok's fitness culture has shifted from all-or-nothing intensity to something more sustainable, more social. A run no longer needs to end with exhaustion; it can finish with a soak, a treatment or a decent meal. That shift matters, especially for anyone trying to restart a routine that quietly slipped away. Pick one that suits your pace. Keep it light. The real win isn't the freebie waiting at the finish line – it's the moment you realise getting out the door no longer requires a pep talk.

Another milestone lands, and this one carries a certain national pride. This year, M Studio rocks up to the Cannes Film Festival 2026 with a confident stride, setting up shop at the Marché du Film – the industry's busiest trading floor. Not just a showcase, more a statement: Thai filmmaking stands ready for a bigger conversation. Photograph: Death Whisperer Photograph: The Confession of a Sorcerer The lineup helps make the case. Death Whisperer: Saming The Werebeast leads with scale and bite, expanding a familiar horror universe while sharpening its visual ambition. Folklore with muscle, backed by effects that hold their own against global heavyweights. Alongside it, The Confession of a Sorcerer takes a quieter, more psychological route. Adapted from The Ghost Radio, it threads mysticism through questions of morality, trading spectacle for tension that lingers. Photograph: M Studio Elsewhere, the slate stretches in all directions. GOD SKIN fuses fantasy with underground boxing, layering tattoo technology over bone-crunching action. Then comes The Last Bliss, Exchange and Khong Khaek 2, each adding a different flavour – from introspective drama to genre-driven storytelling aimed squarely at younger viewers with global tastes. Behind the push stands Surachet Asvaroenganan, steering M Studio's international charge with clear intent. This trip isn't about ticking a festival box. It's about presence, positioning and proving range. Thai cinema has long travelled well across the region. Now, it arrives in Cannes with broader ambition and a clearer voice. Not a quiet introduction, but a proper step forward – one that suggests the next chapter plays out on a much bigger screen.

If you're still lingering somewhere in your Coachella feelings – or just need a solid excuse to get out of the house – Songwat First Vibe is worth penciling in. Inside Tuk Khaek, the old trading building that once sat at the centre of Songwat Road’s multicultural bustle,the three-day pop-up folds together music, art, craft drinks and workshops with the kind of loose, easy energy this neighbourhood does particularly well. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Songwat First Vibe (@songwatfirstvibe) The main pull is the Coachella Listening Party, which runs through highlights from this year’s festival via a curated playlist that moves from golden-hour sets into late-night territory. Cinemagica handles the sound setup using a Waterfall Audio XT1 system, which means cinema-grade audio bouncing around a heritage shophouse instead of a sterile event hall. Beyond the listening party   Photograph: Street Star Gallery   Elsewhere, Street Star Gallery hosts You & Me, A Thousand Tomorrows by Thai artist Pu Rawiwan, a quietly warm exhibition built around the small rhythms and fleeting moments of two people sharing a life together. Photograph: Co-Drinking Space Drinks lean local. At the Co-Drinking Space, Onson pours craft spirits distilled from coconut blossom nectar in Sakon Nakhon, while Longbeach runs a matcha party using ceremony-grade leaves that work equally well neat or spiked. Photograph: Black is the only Color Studio If you’ve been flirting with the idea of getting tattooed but stopping short of commitment, Black is the only Color Studio runs a beginner-friendly handpoke tattoo workshop on Sunday. Participants practise on artificial skin and leave with a full kit, though spots are limited and booking ahead through Instagram  is required. The session costs B1,200. Songwat First Vibe runs May 8-10 from 8am-8pm at Tuk Khaek on Songwat Road near Ratchawong Pier. The handpoke workshop takes place Sunday at 11am

Coffee runs the show for most of us, dictating mornings, meetings and mid-afternoon survival. So let's treat the addiction. World of Coffee Bangkok 2026 lands at Bangkok International Trade and Exhibition Centre from May 7-9, pulling together more than 400 brands from 40 countries and placing Thailand firmly on the map as ASEAN's coffee capital. Photograph: World of Coffee Asia The headline act? The World Cup Tasters Championship, where elite tasters size up flavour profiles at speed, chasing the 2026 title with near-surgical precision. Not far off, Roaster Village lines up an international roster of coffee makers, pouring everything from award-winners to hard-to-find beans that rarely leave their origin. Producer Village, supported by SCATH, shifts the focus closer to home, spotlighting Thai farmers and the craft behind each cup. Photograph: World of Coffee Asia Pick your own caffeine adventure. Cupping Rooms offer structured tastings for anyone keen to sharpen their palate. The SCA Lecture Series brings in industry insiders to unpack trends and techniques without drowning you in jargon. The Community Lounge keeps conversation flowing, while the Brew Bar hands things over to World Coffee Championships winners, each serving precise, competition-level brews using beans sourced across the globe. Doors open 10am-6pm, with an earlier 5pm close on the final day. Tickets via here, come in at B500 for a single day or B1,000 for the full run.

We've hit month five now, and yes, May marks the start of rainy season. But rain or shine, events don't wait around. Plans roll on regardless, and this month's looking pretty packed. Bangkok Pride Festival leads the charge with its city-spanning parade and proper programme, joined by Drag Bangkok Festival and Thailand's Drag Star. Coffee gets equal billing as World of Coffee Bangkok lands alongside Thailand AeroPress Championship, bringing brewers, baristas and plenty of caffeine-fuelled buzz. The music lineup's strong this month. Kraftwerk rocks up with a full multimedia show, whilst Hanumankind stops by on his Asia tour. Reggae gets its moment through Reggae Rumble Thailand Tour, and J.I.D delivers sharp lyricism on the God Does Like World Tour. Then Laufey adds a gentler touch with her Bangkok date. Away from the stage, the annual Neilson Hays Library Book Sale offers a slower pace – shelves of secondhand finds inside one of the city's most elegant buildings. Keeping track of what's coming? Our Bangkok’s top concert roundup for 2026 stays updated with the latest gigs worth marking in your diary. Stay one step ahead and map out your plans with our round-up of the best things to do in Bangkok. Subscribe to our free Time Out Bangkok newsletter and get the very best of the city delivered straight to your inbox.

Rain settles over Bangkok, softening the evenings just enough to make staying out feel like the right decision. The city keeps moving regardless, with a weekend line-up that swings between canal rides, warehouse techno, neighbourhood festivals and air-conditioned vintage hunts. Start outdoors while the weather still behaves. Water Cycling by Punklong’s route drifts through Bang Luang Canal past longtail snack boats and banyan shade, while the newly reopened Green Bridge reconnects Benjakitti Park and Lumphini Park with smoother granite paths and proper cycling lanes. Once the rain kicks in, retreat underground for Re:Turn Market, where more than 80 shops turn Kamphaeng Phet MRT into an all-day browse of vintage clothes, toys, accessories and small-label finds. After dark, Bangkok gets louder again. Ratchada Train Night Market rolls back into full form with three nights of free live music, while ThinkFest 2026 transforms Ari into a roaming circuit of talks, exhibitions and live sets. Elsewhere, Sacristy leans hard into industrial techno with Tokyo selectors EVE and PARSA, and DUAL keeps Bangkok’s underground streak going deep into the night. Proper mixed bag, in the best possible way. Map out the rest of May with our guide to what’s on, and keep an eye on our picks of Bangkok’s best things to do. Map out the rest of the month with our guide to what’s on, and keep an eye on our picks of Bangkok’s best things to do. Subscribe to our free newsletter for the best of Bangkok, straight to your inbox.

Some weeks are about chasing openings. This one leans more towards knowing exactly where to park yourself for a few hours. Bangkok settles into a more café-driven mood this week, which honestly tracks the weather. The city is deep into hot-season survival mode, so cold brews, lighter menus and dessert-leaning drinks are doing most of the heavy lifting right now. HOMU leans fully into pistachio season with Pista&, while C.P.S. Coffee Roaster reworks nostalgic Thai desserts into summer coffee drinks that land sharper than expected. Over in Song Wat, KIMI SW3 opens inside the increasingly busy Soul Songwat with a menu that pulls Thai ingredients through a distinctly Japanese lens. For something more polished, Bangkok Marriott Marquis Queen’s Park rolls out Kagoshima A5 wagyu at Pagoda Chinese Restaurant and Ora King salmon dishes at Akira Back Bangkok, while Blue Parrot Bangkok gives Thursday nights a rosé-soaked reset with DJs, games and complimentary pours for people quick enough to register.

May lands, rain follows, and Bangkok shifts gear. Showers start to roll through, parks turn lush, and the city picks up a quieter kind of energy. Staying in sounds tempting, but galleries aren't having it. Doors stay open, lights stay on, and new exhibitions keep popping up across town. This month's properly busy without trying too hard. Spaces fill with fresh work, each show offering something different – reflective painting here, more experimental setups there. You can dip between them over a few afternoons, ducking out of the rain when you need to, then heading back out once it clears. Not sure where to start? A handful of exhibitions are worth your time right now, each for different reasons. Keep an eye on listings too, as new openings turn up steadily. Consider it a decent excuse to step outside, even when the weather's telling you otherwise. Stay one step ahead and map out your plans with our round-up of the best things to do in Bangkok. Get ahead of the game and start planning your month with our list of top things to do this May. Whether you're a regular gallery-goer or just art-curious, these are Bangkok’s best spots to live the art life. From alleyway masterpieces to paint-splashed corners you might walk past without noticing, here are our top spots to see street art.

Bangkok's The Weeknd fans can finally unclench. After weeks of whispers and wishful thinking, Abel Tesfaye confirms the real thing: a full-scale Bangkok date lands at Rajamangala Stadium on October 11. The show doubles as a victory lap for a trilogy that reshapes his world over the past few years, threading together After Hours, Dawn FM and the newly released Hurry Up Tomorrow. Expect a setlist that moves between eras without slowing down, stacking chart-toppers alongside deeper cuts that reward long-time listeners. Photograph: Kevin Mazur This return arrives on a much larger scale. His previous Bangkok stop kept things contained within an arena, but this time the production expands across a stadium, bringing cinematic visuals, towering staging and tightly choreographed lighting that match the darker, more stylised tone he's been working with lately. Bangkok sits within a wider Asia run too, with dates scheduled across Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia and South Korea – putting the city firmly back on the global touring circuit. Photograph: Hiroya Brian Support comes from Creepy Nuts, the duo behind viral track ‘Bling-Bang-Bang-Born’, joining most of the regional shows. Ticket details follow soon via Live Nation Tero. Presales begin May 18 for fan club members, May 19 for VISA cardholders and May 20 through the promoter, with general sale opening May 21. If you plan on going, set a reminder and move quickly.

Some bands you grow up with. Others grow up alongside you. For Thai fans who had  ‘She Looks So Perfect’ on repeat and walls covered in posters, 5 Seconds of Summer fall firmly in the second camp – which makes this return feel long overdue.  After ten years away, the Sydney four-piece – Luke Hemmings, Calum Hood, Michael Clifford and Ashton Irwin – head back to Bangkok with their Everyone’s a Star! World Tour, landing at UOB Live at EmSphere on November 9. Photograph: livenationth First breaking out in the early 2010s (yes, via those One Direction support slots), the band have since moved well beyond their scrappy pop-punk beginnings into bigger, slicker, stadium-ready territory. The songs hit differently now – less teenage angst, more lived-in nostalgia – but the hooks still land.   Expect a setlist that leans into the full catalogue, from early breakout tracks to later, more polished material. For anyone who’s stuck with them over the years, it’s less a comeback show and more a time capsule – just with better production. When: Monday November 9  Where: UOB LIVE, EmSphere, Bangkok Photograph: livenationth Tickets start at B2,800 and go up to B6,800, with a VIP ‘No.1 Obsession’ package at B8,900(. Presales run May 6-9 ahead of general sale here.  Fan club presale: May 6, 10am-10pm. Mastercard presale: May 7, 10am-11.59pm. Live Nation Tero presale: May 8, 10am-10pmGeneral sale: May 9 from 10am. An ‘Upgrade bite the Apple’ add-on (B3,400) is also available from May 9 — note it does not include a ticket.

Eight cities, one very familiar voice. Jason Mraz lines up his Asia run for 2026, with Bangkok locked in for October 29 at BITEC Live. By our count, this marks his fifth time in Thailand. The ASIA 2026 TOUR arrives after a seven-year stretch off the road, tracing a neat arc across a career that's quietly shaped two decades of easygoing pop. Expect a retrospective setlist with a full band, moving between newer material and the songs that never quite leave rotation – 'I'm Yours', 'I Won't Give Up', 'Lucky'. You already know how that goes. Photograph: Jason Mraz A new record sits alongside it. Grandma's Gospel Favorites carries a more personal thread, first recorded for his grandmother around 20 years ago. The project returns with that same warmth intact, rooted in family ties and long-held memories. It plays as a softer counterpoint to the bigger singalong moments – nothing flashy, just sincerity done well. Tour Schedule: – October 27 – Manila, Mall of Asia Arena – October 29 – Bangkok, BITEC Live – October – Kuala Lumpur – (date TBA) – November 2 – Taipei, TWTC Nangang Exhibition Hall – November 4 – Hong Kong, AsiaWorld-Expo – November 10 – Tokyo, Tokyo Garden Theater – November 11 – Osaka, Osaka Festival Hall – November 14 – Seoul, Kintex Convention Center That's what's confirmed so far, with more details expected soon. Keep an eye on OD ROCK for updates.

Parents, are you actually ready? Bangkok is getting its first live taste of Snoop Dogg’s Doggyland, as Headstand Entertainment brings the children’s YouTube hit to ICONSIAM this July. If the name’s new to you, Doggyland is a computer-animated series for young kids created by Snoop Dogg with October London and Claude Brooks in 2022. Think bright colours, catchy songs and gentle lessons folded into the fun, covering everything from the ABCs and numbers to self-worth, hygiene and good habits. It's educational, but crucially, it doesn’t feel like homework. Photograph: Doggyland The show centres around a cast of animated dogs, each with their own vibe. Woofie's the supportive mate who's always cheering everyone on (and happens to have a belter of a voice). Then there’s Yap Yap, a high-energy pup bouncing through life with relentless enthusiasm. Snoop himself voices Bow Wizzle, the wise mentor keeping the puppies in line. Now, Headstand Entertainment hauls the whole gang over ten thousand miles to ICONSIAM this summer. Details are still fairly thin on the ground, but here's what we know: the live stage show lands at CONSICON Hall on the seventh floor across two dates – July 18 and 19. Expect music, dancing and the kind of positive energy that'll have your kids (and probably you) grinning from ear to ear. The songs cover letters, numbers, colours, hygiene and good habits, so parents can actually join in rather than just standing about looking tired. Tickets drop on April 24. Want early access? Sign up here. For updates, follow Headstand Entertainment on Instagram.

Big news on the gig front: David Byrne lands in Bangkok this August. Yes, that David Byrne. The art rock architect and former Talking Heads frontman confirms a one-night stop as part of the Who Is The Sky? Tour, and you can feel the buzz already. Fresh from a headline-grabbing set at Coachella, he brings the same precision and theatrical punch. Expect a proper stage production: choreography, visuals, a band in constant motion. The sort of performance that sticks with you long after you've left the venue. Photograph: IMDb The setlist pulls from his latest record, Who Is The Sky?, a reflective collection that wrestles with questions of purpose, creativity and what keeps an artist going. It sits alongside older material, and Byrne's catalogue has always been about evolution. Quick refresher: he led Talking Heads between 1975 and 1991, folding art rock, funk and global sounds together long before anyone else caught on. Generations of artists still trace a line back to that era. He plays at UOB LIVE at EMSPHERE on August 10. Tickets start from B2,800. Presale opens May 7 at 11am, with general sale from May 8 at 10am via ThaiTicketMajor. Seating details drop soon, so keep checking.

If you're a fan of hilarious, slightly chaotic comedy that leaves you watching just one more video at 2am, you're in for a treat. Morgan Jay is coming to Bangkok in 2026 with his ‘Goofy Guy Tour’, and it's about time. The American comedian has built a massive following online with his viral autotuned comedy clips and playful crowd antics. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Morgan Jay (@morganjay) Morgan Jay isn't your typical stand-up comedian. He thrives on audience interaction, silly antics and turning everyday situations into laugh-out-loud moments. His shows are less about perfectly rehearsed punchlines and more about pure, unfiltered chaos in the best way possible.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Morgan Jay (@morganjay) What makes his shows so addictive is how unpredictable they are. You might start the evening thinking it's a normal comedy set and end up joining in a sing-along, being called on stage or laughing at something completely unexpected. It's that mix of surprise, energy and goofball charm that keeps fans coming back. So get ready to laugh, scream and maybe even join in on the chaos. Here's what you need to know before the night starts.   When is Morgan Jay performing in Bangkok? November 21 2026. That's when Morgan Jay brings his ‘Goofy Guy Tour’ to Bangkok. Already a fan of his online stuff? Just picture that same vibe happening live right in front of you. Expect chaos, laughs and a night you won't forget.   Where is Morgan Jay performing in Bangkok?  He's heading to KBank Siam Pic-Ganesha Theatre, a modern multi-purpose venue sitting on the seventh and eighth floors of Siam Square One. The space hosts everything from plays to concerts and cultural events, all with top-notch acoustics and tech to match. How to get tickets  Tickets run from B1,800 to B2,400 and you can grab them through Megatix right now. They're split across two floors: downstairs zones A-C will set you back B2,400, while upstairs zones D-E go for B1,800. Seating map Photograph: Megatix

After making Thai 'Deathbat' disciples wait more than a decade, that California roar known as Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) is finally set to return this October – and trust us, they're about to shake things up properly. For over 20 years, this lot have proved they're not just metal icons but legends who refuse to fade. Photograph: Avenged Sevenfold So what sets A7X apart from your standard metal outfit? It's not just Zacky Vengeance's fierce guitar riffs or Synyster Gates' razor-sharp solos. The real magic lives in the spirit and theology woven through their name and lyrics. Since forming in 1999, they've carried the weight of Genesis 4:15 – the story of Cain and Abel – as the backbone of everything they do. Their path hasn't exactly been smooth. Losing drumming genius The Rev in 2009 left a devastating wound that nearly ended it all. But redemption and sheer bloody-mindedness pushed them to new heights instead. Albums like Nightmare and Hail to the King shot straight to number one on the Billboard charts, whilst mega-hits like 'So Far Away' captured hearts across the globe. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Avenged Sevenfold (@avengedsevenfold) This return to Thailand after 11 years – not since 2014 – means more than just another gig. It's a chance to explore that grey area between faith and madness through songs that blend metalcore, progressive and even hints of country rock. Brace yourself for the most powerful show of the year: part metal concert, part celebration of being alive and daring to question the world through every single note. See you at the stage. Catch them at Thunder Dome on October 6-7 from 8pm onwards. Tickets are available now via Ticketmelon.  

We just had Post Malone announce his Big Ass World Tour, and now there's another one to get excited about. Daniel Caesar – the 30-year-old soul and R&B artist who's been quietly nicknamed ‘the man with the voice of heaven’ – is bringing his Son of Spergy Tour to Bangkok. He lands at Impact Arena on June 9, and if you've been sleeping on him, now's the time to wake up. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Daniel Caesar (@danielcaesar)   Caesar first starts turning heads back in 2014 with his early EPs, but it's his debut album Freudian that properly launches him. Singles like 'Get You' and 'Best Part' become instant favourites and earn him Grammy nods. Since then, he works with a handful of big names and quietly cements his place as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary soul. His latest album, Son of Spergy, sees him stretch his sound further – weaving together soul, folk and experimental textures while digging through themes of faith, identity and the messy bits of being human. On tour, that means fresh material sits alongside reimagined versions of his classics, giving both die-hard fans and newcomers something to latch onto. Expect new tracks like 'Who Knows', 'Have A Baby (With Me)' and 'Emily's Song', plus fan favourites from Never Enough and earlier releases. Yes, that includes 'Superpowers', 'Always', 'Cyanide', 'Japanese Denim' and, of course, 'Best Part'. Ticket prices, seating plans and VIP packages get announced soon. Register for presale here.

April isn't just about dodging water during Songkran – you've also got to fight for a spot at the Post Malone concert. His Big Ass World Tour hits Bangkok this September, and he's bringing Don Toliver along for the ride. The Bangkok show lands on September 22 at Rajamangala Stadium, part of a massive Asian run that takes in Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Seoul and Tokyo. View this post on Instagram A post shared by @postmalone If you last saw him here in 2023, you'll know the man only gets bigger. Diamond-certified bangers like Circles, Sunflower, rockstar and Congratulations barely scratch the surface of a catalogue that never sits still. If you caught his 2023 Bangkok show, you already know he just keeps levelling up. The 9x diamond-certified global superstar has massive hits like Circles, Sunflower, rockstar and Congratulations, and they're just the start of a back catalogue that refuses to stand still. Now, here's where it gets tactical. The fanclub presale starts on Monday April 6 from midday to 11.59pm. Mastercard holders get special access too. Their presale runs from Tuesday April 7 at midday through to Thursday April 9 at 12pm. Head here for the details. Trip.com users can grab tickets before everyone else through the app, same window: Tuesday April 7 at midday to Thursday April 9 at midday. Live Nation Tero members get their turn on Thursday April 9 from 2pm to 11.59pm. Membership's free if you sign up through their website. General sale finally opens on Friday April 10 from midday via Thai Ticket Major. Set your alarms, make your coffee strong and good luck – you're going to need it.

Anyone who misses the show of the brooding young man who creates beautifully melancholic songs that tug at the heartstrings, get ready to immerse yourself once again in his signature sombre sound. Joji, the beloved alternative R&B artist, has recently announced a new world tour titled 'OLARIS TOUR 2026', organised by Live Nation Tero, with a confirmed stop in Bangkok on November 24. View this post on Instagram A post shared by JOJI (@sushitrash) After leaving Thai fans listening to his old playlists on repeat for nearly four full years after his Smithereens Tour, Joji  has been consistently active, working on music behind the scenes and gradually releasing new work that's created buzz in the online world. Photograph: LiveNation Asia   Especially his latest album project, 'Piss In The Wind', a new body of work that's received an overwhelming response both in terms of visuals and unique promotional strategy. He's used a lookalike model to represent himself in music videos, whilst the musical direction has intensified while maintaining that melancholic atmosphere and emotionally resonant content. It's the signature that's earned him a dedicated fanbase worldwide. Photograph: LiveNation Asia This comeback isn't only about bringing new work to perform live on stage. It also reinforces his continuously soaring popularity in Thailand, after he previously posted a brief message on his personal social media saying 'tour' to signal what was coming. Today, Thai fans don't have to wait in suspense any longer. Prepare tissues to wipe your tears and get ready to reach the depths of melancholic emotion that is his secret signature by the end of this year.   Follow details on seating chart and ticket prices coming soon at Live Nation Tero.

Photograph: Wanghin Lab There is a stick insect on the table. It is dead, but it doesn’t look it. Long and twig-brown, legs angled outward like dropped from a branch, it has the quality of an animal simply resting. The hindwings are spread flat on washi paper, broader and more ornate than the forewings, faintly iridescent under the light. In life they stay folded out of sight. They only open to startle.  Kawin Sirichantakul twists an entomological pin carefully between his fingers, with the ease of someone who has done this a thousand times – because he has. He tilts his head, finds the spot just to the right of centre on the thorax and pushes down with confidence. The pin goes in cleanly. 'You never pin through the middle,' he says. 'That destroys both sides. You want to leave one side intact for study.' Photograph: Time Out Bangkok This is Wanghin Lab, a home studio and learning space in a residential corner of Bangkok where insects are not pests, not curiosities and not decoration. They’re something altogether more serious: a window into a natural world that most city people might have stopped noticing. Led by two brothers, Kawin and Kavee Sirichantakul, the lab blends art, science and technology to create large-scale insect models, DIY exhibits and hands-on workshops grounded in real research and genuine curiosity. Photograph: Wanghin Lab By any standard, it is an outlier. Strange in shape, rare in spirit. And depending on who you ask, maybe the only one moving like this in Bangkok right now. At Time Out, we would go further. We think Wanghin Lab feels necessary. Let us explain.   How it started Photograph: Time Out Bangkok Kawin is the elder of the two. He has a deep love for nature photography, which has led him to create a handful of documentaries in the field. Kavee, the younger, works as a 3D modeller and is the one who first fell in love with insects. ‘Wanghin Lab did not begin as an entomology project. It began as a question,’ Kavee says.  'After I graduated, I had a gap,' Kavee says. 'I asked myself: what do I actually want to do? And then I talked to my brother about it. What if we tried something that felt like us? Something connected to nature?' Photograph: Time Out Bangkok The family home had space. There was no grand plan for a museum, no business model mapped out in advance, though underneath it all sat something most creative people recognise: the desire to do work that is seen and valued beyond your own four walls.  Both brothers had grown up drawn to the outdoors. Photography pulled them in. Landscapes at first, then macro work – macro, in its very nature, changes what you see. Kawin liked animals and ecosystems broadly. Kavee liked insects specifically. 'Insects are tangible,' he says. 'You can hold them. That changes how you relate to them.' Photograph: Wanghin Lab Kavee taught himself to pin, largely through doing. A friend who worked as a field researcher let him tag along on collection trips. He watched, asked questions and practised. No formal training, no entomology degree. Just repetition and a willingness to be bad at something until he was good at it, which, as he is the first to admit, is very much still the ongoing reality.   The lab, the workshop, the world in a box Photograph: Wanghin Lab Wanghin Lab offers insect pinning workshops where participants learn the process step by step, guided by an expert and take home their own pinned specimen in a display frame along with a certificate of completion. Sessions are kept small, six participants at most, which gives the experience the feeling of a private class rather than a public event. Photograph: Wanghin Lab The workshops opened tentatively, with little fanfare. 'At first nobody came,' Kavee says, with the good-humoured candour of someone who has made peace with a difficult early period.  'We invited friends first, just to test it. Then after the new year they shared it and it started to grow.'  Within a few months the lab had run close to ten rounds, expanded its audience and begun collaborating with schools. Three institutions have brought students through so far, where the brothers introduced a biology class to the basics of specimen collection and pinning. Photograph: Wanghin Lab The target, if there is one, is anyone who loves nature deeply enough to get up close with a pin. In practice that means the audience skews wide. Parents bring their seven-year-olds. Forty-somethings come alone. What they share, the brothers say, is not expertise but openness.   What actually happens Photograph: Wanghin Lab The workshop does not begin with a pin. It begins with a specimen. And before that, with understanding what a specimen is and why it matters. Researchers in the field have been mounting insects for centuries. The practice serves taxonomy, ecology and long-term biodiversity monitoring. But in a research context, speed is the priority: a scientist collecting a hundred specimens in a day works fast and efficiently. Aesthetics are secondary. Wanghin Lab occupies a different space. Participants create pinned specimens that sit at the intersection of art and science, with legs posed, wings spread and bodies positioned with a care that museum collections rarely afford individual specimens. Photograph: Wanghin Lab 'In a museum collection, the insects aren't necessarily beautiful. The legs aren't set to show the shape. They're done quickly because you're processing dozens at a time. We have the luxury of slowing down,' Kavee explains. The process itself has several stages. Insects that have been stored dry need to be relaxed before they can be pinned. A rigid specimen cannot be posed without breaking. The humid jar method, a sealed container with a damp cloth, is slower. Hot water works faster but requires a careful hand. 'You have to keep the water away from the paper,' Kavee says, pulling the beetle from the tray and dabbing it carefully. 'If the paper swells, positioning becomes a nightmare.' Photograph: Wanghin Lab Once pliable, the insect is ready to be mounted. A single entomological pin, stainless steel and rust-free, goes through the thorax, slightly off-centre rather than dead through the middle, so that either side of the body remains intact and readable for study. 'One pin through the body, that's it,' Kavee says. 'The rest is just support. You're not skewering anything else. The moment you start putting pins through the insect itself, you're doing damage.' Strips of washi paper keep the wings flat while everything dries. For a small insect, one to two hours suffices. A larger specimen takes longer, which is why workshops use insects appropriate to the session length. 'While it's drying, we don't just sit around,' Kavee says.  'We look at reference books. We go out back and look at the live ones. You learn more than just how to use a pin.' Photograph: Wanghin Lab Done correctly, a pinned insect can last an extraordinary amount of time. 'If you keep it dry, if nothing gets in to eat it, it lasts indefinitely,' he says. The oldest specimens in the world are over three hundred years old. Some of them are at Cambridge. They're tiny little things. Still perfect.'    The real point Photograph: Wanghin Lab Wanghin Lab is, at its core, not a craft studio. The pinning is just a vehicle. The destination is something harder to package. The brothers describe their mission as reconnecting urban residents with insects and the biodiversity that surrounds them, even in a city as dense and concrete-heavy as Bangkok. Kavee monitors the insects around the family home with something approaching the consistency of a field researcher. Which species appear in which season. What changes when a tree is cut down nearby. What turns up on a particular lamp post at night. 'Most insects are specialists. They don't eat everything, they eat one thing, one plant, one tree, sometimes one specific part of that tree. When that tree goes, they go with it. People worry about us collecting specimens, but honestly, insects reproduce in enormous numbers. Taking a few for science barely registers,' Kavee explains.  'What actually collapses the system is when the habitat disappears entirely. No green space means no insects and if you follow that thread far enough, it doesn't stop at insects. It unravels everything above them too, including us.' Photograph: Wanghin Lab Thailand is one of the most insect-rich countries in the region. Researchers estimate it has upwards of three hundred stick insect species. Japan, by comparison, has around twelve. Part of what threatens that diversity is structural: land tax penalises owners for leaving plots undeveloped, so wetlands and scrubland get cleared not out of malice but economics. Exactly the kind of habitat insects need to survive. Photograph: Wanghin Lab   This is the undergrowth of the whole project: a city that has gradually lost the habitat its insects need and residents who have never been given a reason to care. Wanghin Lab is trying to give them one. Kavee has a favourite example of why that matters. Out surveying near Asok one evening, he caught a stick insect, observed it and released it elsewhere. When he returned a short while later, the insect was back at the exact spot where he had first found it. He looked more closely. There was a nymph in the vegetation, nearly invisible, perfectly camouflaged. 'The adult had flown back because the nymph was calling it,' he says. 'Stick insects communicate through vibration. The nymph was on the branch, vibrating, saying: there's food here. Come back.' He pauses. 'Nobody hears that. You can't hear it. But it's happening everywhere, all the time.' Photograph: Wanghin Lab Insect communication, he could talk about for hours. Chemical signals released and received. Visual displays. The waggle dance of bees. Even the branch-vibration language of stink bugs – each species with its own frequency and rhythm, its own version of a sentence. 'It's complex,' he says. 'Just like us. Just much quieter.' What comes next The workshop programme continues to develop. Sessions open roughly a month in advance. Private bookings are available for those who want a more tailored experience or have already completed the introductory course. There are plans to take things outdoors, pairing specimen collection with pinning for groups who want the full arc of the practice. The longer ambition, though, is a small museum. A permanent space where people can drop in without a booking, browse specimen collections, encounter the world of insects at their own pace. Photograph: Time Out Bangkok 'We want it to be somewhere you can come any time,' Kawin says. 'Come and look, come and learn, come and just sit with it for a while.' Kavee picks up the thread. 'And taking people into parks, into green spaces, showing them what's actually out there. You don't have to go far. It's already here.' And maybe that is the simplest version of what Wanghin Lab is trying to do. Not to bring nature back, because it never really left. Just to remind people where to look and perhaps more importantly, to remember that the city has never belonged to us humans alone. Wanghin Lab is based in Lat Phrao, Bangkok. Workshop schedules and booking information are available at wanghinlab.com, via direct message at @wanghin.lab or by phone on 086 565 5799.  Wanghin Lab, 19 Soi Muban Mahalap, Lat Phrao, Bangkok 10230.

Saw that piece Tyla had on? It traces back to a Thai coastline and a sleeping toddler – and to a designer building something global without losing the thread. There’s a small coastal town in Thailand where a woman sews clothes that now turn up on festival grounds in California, on major music figures and in wardrobes across more countries than she's probably counted. Photograph: CHALAY Chaninporn ‘Cha’ Hess didn’t set out to build a label. She set out to do something with her hands while her son slept. That instinct – simple, practical, personal – grew into Chalay, a globally shipping brand with two artisan production teams, a sell-out track record and a story that still feels grounded. It starts with a self-timer and a handmade crop top, and somehow scales without losing its centre. Photograph: CHALAY Leaving Thonglor behind Before Chalay, life sat firmly in Thonglor. Cha was an accountant by day, orbiting bar culture by night, married to a professional DJ and constantly making things on the side. It worked – creative, social, a little chaotic. Then her son arrived, and the whole setup shifted. Bangkok gave way to the coast. Full-time motherhood replaced the old rhythm, and the pace slowed to something salt-lined and open. It didn’t read as a big pivot at the time. In hindsight, it was the reset that made  everything possible. Photograph: CHALAY A crop top, a wall and a nap window The first Chalay image wasn’t a campaign. It wasn't even planned. It was Cha, wearing a crop top she'd sewn herself, standing against the outside wall of her house while her son slept inside.  ‘I started to design some clothes as a hobby,’ she says – a line that sounds casual but carries the entire origin story. The name followed the same logic: Cha from Chaninporn, Lay from ‘talay,’ the Thai word for sea. It’s geography and identity stitched together – where she is now and who she is.   When Coachella found it At first, things moved the way most real brands do – slowly, through word of mouth. Customers found Chalay locally, drawn to pieces that felt handmade and specific rather than mass-produced. Then the festival crowd clocked it. Coachella has always been a hunting ground for pieces that photograph well and don’t exist anywhere else – vintage-adjacent, globally sourced, genuinely one-off. Chalay slipped neatly into that space. When it hit, it moved fast. ‘It suddenly changed the situation when it went viral,’  Cha says, without overstating it – more observation than hype..  Photograph: CHALAY   Built across two craft worlds What makes Chalay more than just another aesthetic success is how it’s built. Production runs through two teams at opposite ends of Thailand, each rooted in a different tradition. Up north, Cha works with a Hmong community known for intricate handmade textiles and patterning. They've been part of the brand from the start. ‘I am proud that Chalay can be able to give them a better life and income for their families,’ she says – not as a tagline, but as a responsibility that sits behind the work. In the south, a second team draws from the world of Manora (or Nora), one of Thailand's oldest dance-drama traditions, where costume-making is detailed enough to feel like its own discipline. Pieces like the Nora dress and the Rayya top come out of this collaboration.  Two regions, two distinct lineages, one shared idea: clothing that carries culture forward rather than flattening it. As Cha puts it, it’s about ‘sharing the traditional, cultural and storytelling in every stitch’. Photograph: CHALAY Pha thung, reworked Growing up inside Thai visual culture leaves a mark. For Cha, it starts with the pha thung – the wrapped skirt worn across generations, modest, practical, beautiful. It becomes the blueprint for one of Chalay's most recognisable pieces. The Sinh Siam skirt lifts that same grammar – the proportions, the ease, the everyday familiarity of local mothers' clothing – and shifts it forward without sanding it down. What’s key is how Cha handles reference. It’s not mood-board styling or surface-level borrowing. The cultural cues sit inside the structure – in silhouette, in pattern logic, in how the garment moves – rather than being applied as decoration. ‘I would like to express Thainess and local culture which I'm really proud of,’ she says. The emphasis lands on pride. Not nostalgia, not heritage-as-aesthetic, but something lived and continous. Photograph: CHALAY/TYLA When Tyla wore it Then there’s the Tyla moment – the kind that tips a niche label into wider view. When the South African singer, riding the wave from ‘Water’ into global pop visitility, appeared in a Chalay piece, the reaction wasn’t calculated. The team  screamed. The piece itself matters. It comes out of the southern collaboration: a contemporary silhouette carrying hand-stitched Nora patterning. Traditional craft, but worn in a way that doesn’t feel museum-bound. The collection sells out. That’s the headline. But Cha’s takeaway sits elsewhere. ‘I was so proud to bring something of Thai culture to the world,’ Cha says. That's the point. Not the co-sign, not the sell-out – the fact that the craft travelled intact. Photograph: CHALAY Not playing the expected role Global visibility comes with its own set of expectations, especially for designers working outside Western fashion centres. There’s a pressure to become legible on someone else’s terms – to be ‘exotic’, ‘traditional’, easily categorised. Cha’s response is disarmingly simple: she mostly opts out. ‘Nothing can please everyone so I don't have any pressure from expectation at all,’ she says. ‘I just do things at my very best and I am happy with that.’  It sounds straightforward, but holding that line – making work without shaping it for an imagined audience – is harder than it reads. It’s also what lets Chalay stay specific. Photograph: CHALAY Start first, refine later For younger designers figuring things out, Cha's advice cuts through the usual overthinking. ‘Just start doing it and don't worry too much!’ It’s blunt, but it tracks. The brand itself begins that way – one piece, one image, no grand plan. On preserving traditional craft, she shifts the focus again, this time to perception. ‘It started with you seeing the value in any small thing,’ she says. The pha thung your grandmother wore, embroidery on a temple wall, festival costumes repeated so often their origins blur. ‘They might look old or not casual, but it’s about thinking how to elevate them into something else.’ That reframing – not discarding, not preserving unchanged, but reworking – sits at the core of what Chalay does. Photograph: CHALAY Still by the sea Thonglor is another life now. The accountant years sit even further back. What remains is the through-line: a move to the coast, a handmade piece during a nap window, a name pulled from the self and sea – and a brand that now travels well beyond it. Every piece gets the same attention. No favourites, because that would mean stepping outside the work and ranking it after the fact. Somewhere in the north, a Hmong artisan threads a needle. In the south, hands trained in Nora costume-making do the same. And Cha stays by the water, holding the structure together as the rest moves outward. The visibility, the sell-outs, the celebrity moments – they come and go. The work holds.

If you’ve been paying attention to the global dining circuit, you’ll know Potong isn’t just having a moment. It’s shaping one. Set inside a 120-year-old former Chinese herbal pharmacy in Yaowarat, the restaurant has become one of Bangkok’s most talked-about dining rooms, where chef Pichaya ‘Pam’ Soontornyanakij turns personal history into something you can really taste. Now, with Potong landing in the top 10 of the Food & Wine Global Tastemakers Awards, it finds itself in a different kind of spotlight. The annual list, built from nominations by more than 400 chefs, writers and travel experts – before being ranked by a global advisory board – is less about white tablecloth tradition and more about how food connects to place, memory and identity. For Pam, this recognition is very significant. ‘It’s a very meaningful recognition, both personally and for the team, because it reflects a long process of building something with intention and consistency,’ she says. ‘When you open a restaurant like Potong, you don’t think about rankings at the beginning. You focus on developing your identity, your food and your team step by step.’ And then there is the bigger picture. ‘For a long time, Thai food was often simplified or misunderstood globally. Recognition like this helps expand that perception and allows people to see the full complexity of what our cuisine represents.’   So what does ‘world-class dining’ even mean now? For years, the idea of ‘world-class dining’ came with a fixed image. Tasting menus, formal service, a certain European framework. Picture Michelin. Now, that’s changing. ‘I think there is a clear shift happening,’ Pam says. ‘In the past, fine dining often followed a very specific format. Today, there is more openness in how excellence is defined.’ ‘This creates space for more diversity in the industry. It allows chefs to build something that reflects where they come from, rather than adapting to a fixed global standard. I think this is a positive evolution because it makes the dining landscape more interesting, more personal and more connected to different cultures.’ Photograph: Gastrofilm At Potong, that shift feels natural rather than strategic. The cooking is rooted in her Thai-Chinese heritage, guided by family history and the building itself, but never weighed down by it. Photograph: Gastrofilm ‘The experience must be led by the food itself,’ she explains. ‘Flavour, balance and technique are the foundation. The idea behind the dish should support that, not dominate it.’ Photograph: Gastrofilm     Not all lists are created equal With more global rankings than ever, credibility has to be a part of the conversation.  ‘What stands out to me is the broader perspective it takes. It looks beyond technical execution and considers what a restaurant represents – its identity, its cultural context and the overall experience it creates for guests. That allows for a wider range of restaurants to be recognised, including those that may not follow traditional fine dining structures.’ ‘At the same time, what makes a list feel more relevant is when it reflects diversity and has a clear, consistent perspective. When different styles of cooking are recognised and evaluated thoughtfully, it becomes more credible for both chefs and diners. In the end, it’s not just about the ranking itself, but about the conversation it creates around food and culture.’   Bangkok is not catching up. It’s already here If anything, this moment feels less like a breakthrough and more like recognition catching up with what’s actually happening in Bangkok’s kitchens. ‘Bangkok has become a very strong part of the global dining conversation, and I think that will continue to grow,’ Pam says. ‘The city has a unique balance – very strong street food culture, access to diverse and high-quality ingredients and a new generation of chefs who are confident in expressing their own identity.’ ‘What makes Bangkok interesting is that it remains very connected to its roots, even as it evolves. You can see traditional cooking methods, family-run businesses, and modern restaurants all existing together in the same space. That creates a very dynamic environment, and it gives chefs a lot of inspiration to work with.’ Photograph: Gastrofilm And when guests finally walk through the door? Forget the rankings. Forget the lists. What matters is the feeling you leave with. Good food leaves a mark, and encourages return. ‘I want guests to feel that the experience was thoughtful and balanced – not just in the food, but in the overall journey. If they leave remembering how the meal made them feel – something calm, complete and considered – then I think we’ve achieved what we set out to do.’ Looking ahead Photograph: Poldiva   If Southeast Asia’s presence on global lists still feels sparse, that’s because it is. However, that may not last for long. ‘Southeast Asia has a very strong culinary foundation, with deep traditions, diverse ingredients and a wide range of techniques that have been developed over generations. As chefs continue to explore these elements with more precision, I believe the region will play an even bigger role in shaping global dining. The influence will come from authenticity – from understanding our own roots properly and presenting them with clarity and confidence.’ Which, in many ways, is exactly what Potong has been doing all along.

If you needed proof that Thai drag has arrived on the world stage, Gawdland just handed it to you. The first Thai queen to win RuPaul's Drag Race: UK vs the World. Before her, Pangina Heals had already been laying the groundwork – hosting Drag Race Thailand Season 3, then stepping up to compete on UK vs the World herself. Every think piece, every ‘watch this space’ moment has been building to this. Gawdland feels like the exclamation mark at the end of a sentence  years in the making. Photograph: Pangina Heals What makes these looks land isn’t just the concept. It's the craft hiding inside it: rhinestones sewn on one by one, fittings that happen six or seven times before a seam is signed off, and the instinct to get the brief before it even exists. That person, for many of these looks, is Veed. Known as smveed.official, he's the designer behind some of the most striking pieces in Thai drag and performance fashion, built on obsessive craftsmanship, a theatrical eye and a clear refusal to play it safe. Alongside him is Fam, known as three_theofficial, the headpiece designer whose sculptural creations sit right at the top of a look. Veed builds the silhouette, Fam quite literally crowns it.   Photograph: davidelaffe   We had Gawdland drop by our office just months before she went on to make history. There was something sweet in the air that day, though no one knew yet she'd be carrying the Thai flag all the way to the top. Read more here. Now, as the win settles in, we're turning the spotlight onto the creative force behind the looks. Many hands and minds shaped this journey – today, we're focusing on two of them. Short names, precise work: remember them, Veed and Fam. Here's where it all began, how they think and why the most interesting looks are often the ones that spark debate. Spoiler: they’re into that.    Start at the beginning  – how Veed and Fam found their craft  Where did it all begin? Veed: ‘It started with art and a question: how do you take something you love and make it real?’ My aunt used to bring Issey Miyake bags into the house when I was small, and something about the way those objects existed lodged itself in my mind. That eventually led me to John Galliano's Dior haute couture show from 2003, and the whole world cracked open. That show – the collision of cultural references, theatrical excess and genuine beauty – completely reframed what fashion could be for me. It was never just clothing. It felt more like mythology with a zip.’ Fam: It started with making pieces for myself – for class assignments and faculty performances. Then people began noticing and reaching out, asking me to make things for them. Trace the early work and how it evolved Veed: Looking back, I was completely in the world of costume – everything built around specific characters and very particular fantasies. Japanese animation, high-drama aesthetics, a visual language that only really makes sense at full volume.  The shift came when I enrolled at a vocational development centre in Phatthalung, where I learned to sew properly. Not just the idea of it, but the physical reality: how fabric behaves, what a needle does, how a machine reads a seam. The more I understood the process, the more absorbing it became. The precision, the way cloth falls from different angles, the quiet drama of a well-constructed garment – it all started to feel like magic with a technical manual. Photograph: three_theofficial Fam: My early work leaned into cosplay-style – mostly pieces made for class assignments. The first thing I ever made was a Sogeking mask from One Piece, for a school project.   Build the look – what each piece brings Veed: The body comes first. A look for a show isn't just about how it photographs or reads from across a room. It has to work with the person wearing it – how they move, how they perform, how their body speaks when the music starts. Some pieces go through six or seven fittings before they're right, with adjustments made not just for fit but for rhythm.  ‘The outfit has to sync with the song. It has to breathe with the performer. Anything less is just a very expensive obstacle.’ Fam: A headpiece is what makes a look complete. An outfit can be beautiful on its own but still feel like something’s missing – like the story hasn't quite been told.  ‘The moment you bring a headpiece in, everything clicks. It fills the gap and the whole look becomes what it was always meant to be.’ Photograph: pattographyx Handle the unseen – the hardest parts of the work What are the hardest parts of this work that most people never see?  Veed: Fashion – especially at the level of real tailoring and construction – demands patience and precision that can be brutal.  ‘There are moments when you have a grand vision in your head and then you sit down to execute it and realise how much invisible work is hiding inside the dream.’  The gap between what you see and what it takes to get there can feel enormous. There were times when that voice crept in: is this right? Is this really where I'm supposed to be? But I stayed! Fam: The biggest challenges are time and materials.  ‘Finding new materials that can reduce the weight of the headpiece without compromising the look – that's a constant puzzle.’ It has to be comfortable enough to sit on someone's head, sometimes for hours. I'm always adjusting structure and weight so it doesn't become a burden for the person wearing it. Photograph: davidelaffe Read the performer – working with Gawdland When you first started working with Gawdland, how did you approach understanding who she is? Veed: Gawdland is genuinely fun creative territory, and that's not a throwaway compliment. Her identity sits at an interesting intersection: modern and playful, with a pull between something conservative and something that twists it sideways. There's a generational energy to her that keeps the design process alive. If anything, it’s hard to stop. Fam: Working with Gawdland is actually quite straightforward. The team usually comes with images or references already in hand, and I design within that to create something that fits the look they've envisioned. Shape the idea – from concept to finished look Walk us through the creative exchange – how does an idea become a finished piece? Veed: It starts with understanding who someone actually is – not just what they like to wear, but their temperament, their way of thinking, the energy they carry without realising it. Some people appear still but are intricate. Some seem strong but hold something fragile inside.  All of that becomes material. It can be translated through silhouette, fabric, colour or the smallest detail. Clothes are a language. They tell a person's story without requiring them to say a word. The goal is never to reinvent someone – it's to make what's already there feel clearer and more like itself. Photograph: smveed.official Fam: The team comes with rough references and gives me a scope to work within. From there, I take those references and bring my own ideas into the design. It's a collaboration – they set the direction, I build the detail. Pinpoint the look – defining Gawdland Is there a specific Gawdland look that captures her most completely?   Photograph: wowpresentsplus   Veed: The carpet look. It brings together everything that makes Gawdland interesting: High Camp, a fashion sensibility that knows exactly when to twist convention, and a reading of conservative cultural aesthetics put through a very particular filter. The headpiece, the make-up, the construction – it all works together to say something specific. It doesn't just look good. It means something. Photograph: Laliphat Bumrungkarn – Time Out Bangkok Fam: The piece Gawdland wore for the promotional shoot. For me it speaks to Thai identity reinterpreted in a more contemporary way. That tension between tradition and modernity is exactly the kind of problem I love to solve. Hold the signature – the pieces that feel most personal  And which piece holds the most of you in it? Photograph: Pangina Heals Veed: The Likay look I created for Pangina Heals, for the opening episode of Drag Race Thailand Season 3 when she came out as host. That one sits closest to me. It was a genuine merging of Camp and Thainess, with both holding their ground rather than one swallowing the other.  ‘And the craft involved was not for the faint-hearted: rhinestones sewn on one by one, in exactly the way traditional Likay costume makers actually work.’ It's slow, it's painstaking, but entirely worth it. That level of attention doesn't disappear when the cameras roll. Photograph: smveed.official Fam: The promotional shoot piece, honestly. That's genuinely who I am – someone who takes traditional Thai headpieces and finds ways to make them feel modern. That piece didn't just look like me. It came from me. Photograph: three_theofficial Step onto the stage – seeing the work go global Seeing your work on a global stage – has it changed how you see what you do, and what brought you to this point? Veed: The approach doesn't change, even when the platform does. When I worked with Nicky Doll for Drag Race France, it was the same method as always: start from who they are, read their energy and find the answer through your own perspective. The scale confirms the method – it doesn't replace it.  ‘And I think what brought me here is consistency and the willingness to risk being wrong.’ Photograph: smveed.official   If something looks beautiful in a familiar way, it becomes just another look – nothing people hold onto. ‘The things that stick are the ones that make people talk, that spark a little friction, that you can't immediately categorise.’ I don't like making things that have already been made. That instinct has, almost accidentally, become my most recognisable quality: when a client wants to stand out, they know where to find me. Fam: I feel genuinely proud. That Gawdland and the designer trusted me and gave me the chance to be part of a global drag stage – that means everything.  ‘Trust is really what got me here. People saw the work, believed in it and kept coming back.’   Push forward – what comes next Where are you taking things from here? Veed: I try to put craftsmanship into everything I make, because it's something you can't find on a shop floor or order online. It's what turns a piece of clothing into something people remember. That's where I'm heading – deeper into the work that takes time, demands skill and leaves a mark. Follow along at @smveed.official. Fam: I want to keep pushing Thai headpieces into new spaces – finding ways to make something so rooted in tradition feel completely current. There's a lot more to explore there and I've barely started. So watch me as I go. Follow @three_theofficial.

Sometimes, moments of quiet sensory attention can feel almost radical. Yet scent has a strange way of interrupting that rhythm. A trace of jasmine drifting through evening air. A faint hint of wood lingering in a hallway. The soft sweetness of a room spray that appears without warning and suddenly rearranges memory. Long before sight or touch, fragrance reaches the emotional part of the brain. It reminds us of people, places and moments we thought we had forgotten. Perhaps that is why scent remains one of the quietest forms of emotional therapy. It is also the central language of Ganda Saitum, founder of Ganda Scent & Object. Her practice does not treat perfume simply as a cosmetic product. Instead it functions more like a library of emotions. Each fragrance captures a moment, a mood or a fragment of memory.   “Scent is something very honest, it speaks before we have time to explain it.”   Interestingly, Ganda did not originally plan to become a perfumer. Her career began in publishing, working as a beauty editor during the era when print magazines still held  sway. Those years exposed her to countless products and perfumes. She spent long days reviewing fragrances and analysing trends. Creation arrived later. ‘One day my husband, Surasak Ittirit, joked that maybe I should start making something of my own,’ she recalled. ‘He said: “If you only review things, you will become a very good critic’’.’ The comment stayed with her. Photograph: Ganda Saitum Soon afterwards she enrolled in a half-day workshop about candle making and fragrance blending. The class took place in a modest shophouse studio. Nothing about it suggested a life-changing experience. Her husband soon joined the project. A photographer with a strong interest in fine art, he became responsible for designing the objects and packaging surrounding the fragrances. The partnership felt natural. Together they already run a production house creating advertising and media content, so creative work has always filled their daily life. The brand’s name reflects that partnership with surprising simplicity. ‘Scent is me,’ she said. ‘Object is my husband.’ From there the story unfolded slowly, bottle by bottle, note by note. Photograph: Ganda Saitum Learning to listen to scent Before blending her own fragrances, Ganda thought about perfume the way many people do. It was an invisible accessory. Something that revealed personality or taste. ‘A fragrance could tell you something about a person,’ she said. ‘It hinted at their character.’ That perception changed the moment she began working with raw materials herself. Suddenly, scent felt less like decoration and more like language. ‘Every note has its own voice,’ she explained. ‘Even lavender smells different depending on where it grows.’ Photograph: Ganda Saitum The process requires careful listening. One ingredient may feel bright and optimistic. Another carries warmth or melancholy. A successful fragrance emerges when those voices settle into balance. Ganda describes the act of blending as almost meditative. ‘I smell each ingredient carefully and ask whether it belongs in that moment,’ she said. If the note does not feel right, she simply returns it to the shelf. ‘I believe every scent will eventually find its place,’ she added. ‘Just maybe not today.’ Photograph: Ganda Saitum Why the brand includes objects The name Ganda Scent & Object often raises questions. Why include the word object? At first glance it seems to refer to packaging or fragrance tools. In reality the idea extends much further. ‘Object can be many things,’ Ganda explained. ‘It can be artwork, scent tools or collaborations with other creators.’ Her husband leads that side of the practice. As a photographer and visual artist, he often experiments with materials that people usually overlook. ‘Sometimes he transforms something very simple into something unexpected,’ she said. Photograph: Ganda Saitum The couple have avoided opening a permanent shop for now. Instead their fragrances appear through collaborations and temporary installations. You might encounter their scent in a gallery. A design space. A fitness studio. Even a restaurant. ‘We enjoy presenting fragrance in different environments,’ Ganda said. Those moments create a different kind of interaction. People first notice the scent, then the object that releases it. Curiosity follows. “When someone experiences a small moment of happiness because of a scent, it makes us happy” Photograph: Ganda Saitum Nine scents, nine emotional moments So far Ganda has created nine fragrances for the brand, each representing a specific emotional state. When I asked which one she loves most, she laughed softly. ‘Right now I like this one,’ she said. The answer changes depending on how she feels that day. Each scent carries its own story. Photograph: Ganda Saitum The first fragrance, Gathering Clouds, was inspired by the view outside her riverside home in Nakhon Chai Si beside the Tha Chin river. The name references Ruam Mek Bridge nearby. ‘The feeling was something between happiness and sadness,’ she said. ‘Soft and neutral like clouds moving across the sky.’ Photograph: Ganda Saitum Another scent called Quiet Echo appeared after a high-intensity, interval training workout. Lying on the floor in the resting yoga pose of savasana, Ganda felt completely exhausted yet strangely calm. ‘It became a scent about resilience,’ she explained. ‘About reminding yourself that you are stronger than you think.’ Memory also plays a powerful role in her work. The fragrance Old Picture was created for her father after his passing. ‘I do not believe we must remain sad when remembering someone we love,’ she told me. ‘When we think of them, we meet them again in our memory.’ Interestingly that scent was actually the first perfume she ever blended during a workshop years earlier. She kept it quietly stored until the right moment arrived. Photograph: Ganda Saitum Another fragrance, Evenfall, takes inspiration from The Godfather and its sequel. The scent reflects solitude and quiet confidence. It captures the moment evening arrives and the world grows quieter. Among all nine creations, the most difficult may have been Endless Rose. The concept sounded simple. She wanted to create a rose fragrance that even people who normally dislike rose might enjoy. In practice the process proved surprisingly challenging. ‘I wanted it to express the feeling of liberation,’ she said. ‘But at that time I had not yet experienced that feeling myself.’ Instead she had to imagine it. The result became one of the brand’s most popular scents. ‘Now I think it might be my favourite,’ she admitted. Somewhere in the background she suspects the tenth fragrance may already be forming. Photograph: Ganda Saitum When Scent Meets the Table One of the most unusual collaborations from Ganda Scent & Object appeared recently at XXG Xin Xe Goi. The project is called Scent to Table. The idea sounds experimental at first. Pair fragrance with food. Allow aroma and flavour to unfold together. Photograph: Ganda Saitum The collaboration began when Ganda created three scent variations for the restaurant partners to choose from. At some point the conversation shifted. Instead of selecting only one scent, why not explore all three?   “The restaurant already serves wonderful food and drinks, so bringing scent into the experience felt natural.”   After all, aroma is already part of taste. The fragrances were carefully designed so they never overpower the dishes. Instead they remain light and atmospheric. ‘The scent should stay in the background,’ she said. ‘It supports the experience rather than competing with it.’ During the dinner guests first smell the fragrance. Soon afterwards the dish arrives. Some people return to the scent while eating. Gradually the two sensations merge. Photograph: Ganda Saitum Even the drinks follow the same idea. A small scent card sits on the rim of the glass so aroma and flavour arrive together with each sip. The project introduced three scent identities named XXG001, XXG002 and XXG003. ‘The scent carried the spirit of a fighter,’ Ganda said. From that starting point she developed three variations. Photograph: Ganda Saitum XXG001 remains closest to the original fragrance but includes gentle Chinese herbal notes reflecting the history of Xin Xe Goi Street. XXG002 draws inspiration from the kitchen itself. Ingredients like coriander and basil mirror the playful cooking style that blends Western, Chinese and Thai influences. XXG003 allowed the greatest freedom. It combines airy herbal notes with a hint of smoke that captures the atmosphere of evening gatherings. That final scent eventually became the restaurant’s signature fragrance. The name combines both collaborators. Photograph: Ganda Saitum XXG represents Xin Xe Goi. GD represents Ganda. ‘It reflects both the place and my interpretation of it,’ Ganda explained. Photograph: Ganda Saitum Closing reflections When Ganda reflects on the journey behind Ganda Scent & Object, one thought often returns. She was 46 when she created the brand a year ago. Her husband had just turned 50. ‘Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had discovered this earlier,’ she admitted. Then she smiled. ‘But maybe that is also the lesson. It is never too late to begin something you love.’ The work has changed her in unexpected ways. Perfume blending requires precision and concentration. Every drop matters. ‘I used to be quite careless,’ she laughed. ‘Fragrance does not allow that.’ Photograph: Ganda Saitum Looking ahead, she hopes to expand into personal fragrances – many people already wear the brand’s room sprays as perfume. More collaborations are also planned with galleries, artists and creative spaces. For now the most immediate way to experience her work may be through the Scent to Table collaboration at XXG Xin Xe Goi. The fragrance created for the project continues to fill both floors of the restaurant and remains available as a home scent. Special dishes and drinks inspired by the fragrance will stay on the menu until April. Guests can walk in, although reservations are recommended during busy dinner hours. Photograph: Ganda Saitum Those curious about the collaboration can also ask the staff which menu items were inspired by the XXG x GD scent. ‘I really recommend trying them,’ she said. ‘The food and drinks are truly delicious.’ Her fragrances are also available through the brand’s social channels and selected locations across Thailand. In Bangkok they appear at Boundary in Thonglor, Flat No. 8 at Central World and several BFF locations including Central Chidlom, Mega Bangna, The Taste Thonglor and Central Ladprao. Outside the capital the scents can be found at Raya Heritage Hotel in Chiang Mai. Photograph: Ganda Saitum A permanent shop may come one day. But not yet. ‘When the time feels right,’ she said. Until then the scents continue to travel. From studio to restaurant, from memory to table, quietly inviting anyone willing to slow down and breathe.

A few weeks back, a new Afrobeats R&B Amapiano album dropped in Bangkok: Mr. Saxo Love. A genre the city is only just warming up to, Tobii – the artist behind this homegrown soundtrack – debuted its release at a poolside party, banana floats and all, the standout track Banana tying it all together. After the party, we sat with the full album, speakers positioned perfectly, and  came out the other side a little sound-drunk. A little melody-soaked. One song bled into the next, just as you’d expect from good Afrobeats, until the final track. But we were left with questions – quite a few, actually. Next thing we knew, Universal Music Thailand office had Tobii – the man, myth and legend himself – sitting right across from us. Tobii (Tobias Phuwanai Mattmueller) split his childhood between Swiss mountain air and the sweaty, electric sprawl of Bangkok. He taught himself to record music on a borrowed computer running cracked software, which is either very punk or very resourceful. Probably both. Photograph: tressatobii Fast forward a decade or so and Mr. Saxo Love is his latest, freshest, most danceable album yet. Undeniably sexy, his melodies drift somewhere between your hips and your better judgement – teasing, playful and fully aware of their effect. The virality it brought with it was never really a surprise. This is Tobii. To the T. Who exactly is Tobii? Photograph: Universal Music Thailand There's a particular kind of ease about people who've had to reinvent themselves more than once. Tobii has that ease in spades. Born in Switzerland and relocating to Bangkok as a young teen, he’s  now carving out a lane in the city's music scene that nobody’s quite occupied before – an Afrobeats and Amapiano artist in a country where neither genre has deep roots, rapping and singing in a freewheeling mix of Thai and English and performing on stages that range from sweaty clubs to festival main stages. At 26, he seems completely at ease with the unconventional route that brought him here, and honestly, that makes all the difference. Where did it all begin? Photograph: tressatobii Wind back to Tobii at 15. Home alone a lot of the time, with too much energy and nowhere to put it. Figuring out software through intuition and a sense for good music, by 19, he'd found his outlet. 'I just wanted to record by myself,' he says. No fancy setup, no mentor, no plan. Just a borrowed computer, FL Studio on a cracked free download and whatever microphone he could get his hands on. It's the kind of origin story that feels almost cliche in its simplicity – but this bedroom producer stumbled into something far more real than most other wannabes. Photograph: Universal Music Thailand What followed was years of quietly grinding, building a sound in a city that wasn't exactly clamouring for Afrobeats. But Tobii had a secret weapon: a complete lack of ego when it came to unashamed self-promotion. While a lot of his generation were too cool to push their own music, he was simply texting people – friends, acquaintances, whoever – telling them to listen. ‘Some people might feel like they're too cool to text someone and say: yo, listen to my song. I just didn't care. I just sent it to people!’ How did the mic confidence come? Photograph: pparnthepp / tressatobii Before the studio sessions and the label deal, there was the club circuit. Tobii fell into MC work through his DJ friends, who one day just asked if he fancied giving it a go. He said yes, more or less on the spot. Because why would you turn that down, right? 'It gave me confidence,' he explains. 'I didn't really know how to talk on a mic, so it was a good chance to go outside. Explore. Try things out.' It's worth noting that standing in a packed Bangkok club and keeping a crowd alive is no small feat. That kind of on-the-job training – for use of a better word – gives in to raw, unforgiving, and immediate experience, while also giving performers something no studio session could ever achieve. ‘You either hold the room or you don't,’ he says. What's Tobii’s sound and where does it come from? Photograph: tressatobii Here's where Tobii's story gets genuinely interesting. Afrobeats and Amapiano in Bangkok is not an obvious pitch. But for Tobii, the connection is more personal than calculated. He grew up in Switzerland around Black friends from kindergarten – and he'll tell you straight, that it shaped him. The music they listened to, the culture they moved through together, the sounds that filled those early years. 'I think that inspired me a lot,' he says simply. It's not a marketing angle. It's just how he was raised. Photograph: Universal Music Thailand Throw in a deep love for African culture more broadly and the musical direction starts to make sense. Add Chris Brown, Michael Jackson and 50 Cent to the mix – artists he's been absorbing since childhood – and you start to hear where that melodic, Afro-driven sensibility comes from. As for language, Tobii writes in whatever works. English gets the nod for its double meanings and flexibility. Thai, he admits with a laugh, is 'very difficult to write in a certain way.' The solution? Mix both. It's a code-switching approach that feels natural for someone who's always existed between multiple worlds and fits the Bangkok music scene perfectly. Multi-lingual, he speaks Swiss German, English and Thai – though by his own admission, 'I'm not good at Thai, I'm not good at English either.’ His solution is to mix them both – smart.   Mr. Saxo Love hit the internet running – Tobii on why digital culture changes everything for new artists The album has 15 tracks – Banana, Hotel Lobby, Naughty, Phuket, Bad Girls Like You to name a few – and TikTok Thailand has been featuring them all. Bad Girls Like You sitting at close to 3.9 million user-created clips alone, more coming in as we speak. Tobii thinks he knows why. ‘It's nostalgic, passionate, a little sexy – okay, maybe more than a little,’ he laughs.  ‘That 2000s R&B feeling crashed into Afrobeats and Amapiano and came out the other side wanting to dance. No heavy stuff. Just love, groove and good intentions. People felt it. And when people want to move, TikTok dances happen.’ He's quick to share the credit too – throwing big shoutouts to the dancers and choreographers who took the song further than he could have alone. We can’t help but wonder: is digital the necessary path for new artists now? Tobii replies before we can think; 'I think in this day and age, virality is part of the game.’ What's the big moment so far?   Photograph: tressatobii   Ask Tobii about his first festival performance – Rolling Loud – and he deflects the hype slightly. The stage was big, yes. The excitement was real. But it's the backstage moments that he keeps coming back to.'I saw artists I'd only ever seen on TV,' he says. The highlight? Chris Brown, in the flesh, performing live. 'I had my little glasses on. I was crying.' He never did get to say hello. But here's the thing – it was the same stage Tobii would go on to perform on himself. Watching your biggest inspiration from the wings of a festival, then standing on that exact same stage. That's the kind of full-circle moment you don't forget. Going international – was it the plan? Photograph: pparnthepp / tressatobii Not exactly. The English version of Bad Girls Like You featuring Dolla came together less through grand strategy and more through good timing and proximity. The label had arranged a lunch where artists could connect. Tobii ended up in the same room as Dolla, they talked, they clicked and the collaboration followed. 'They came actually,' he says, still sounding mildly delighted by the low-key way it unfolded. Organic, unforced and ultimately a move that started to open doors beyond the Thai market. Clubs, festivals or intimate gigs – where does it hit best? Photograph: tressatobii Put the question to Tobii and he thinks about it properly rather than just giving the diplomatic answer. Clubs are fun – they're where he cut his teeth, after all. But he's candid about the reality. 'If I'm being real, at the club they don't just come to see me,' he says, a smile creeping in. 'They're trying to do other things.' Fair enough – the music gets you through the door, but Tobii himself might just be the reason you stick around. He laughs and we'll leave it at that. Festivals are different. 'People really pay and come to see you,' he says. There's the freedom of the stage itself – the space to move, to breathe, to feel genuinely unrestricted. 'I just feel free up there.' Big stages win. Is Bangkok the forever home? Photograph: tressatobii Tobii moved here at 12 because his parents decided Thailand was where they wanted to be. The music came later. But now, the two things – city and career – feel inseparable. He misses Switzerland sometimes. Of course he does. But Bangkok has something that's impossible to walk away from. 'It just feels like peace,' he says calmly. It's one of those answers that sounds simple but the emotion runs deeper. 'People smiling. You have these big festivals, the UFC, you have mountains – it's just everything in one.' He believes Thailand has a serious case to be made as Southeast Asia's premier festival destination. Tomorrowland has landed. Rolling Loud too. The infrastructure is growing, the energy is right and for Tobii, it was never really a question of going back. What's next? Tobii is still early in the game – and by his own reckoning, we've barely scratched the surface. 15 tracks made it onto the debut album. The vault, apparently, runs deep. If this is just the beginning, the rest of it is going to be very interesting indeed. As fans of the genre, we can’t wait to hear more.

In a world of apps and algorithms, Subhas Kandasamy is betting that four people around a square table – tiles clacking, strangers becoming friends – is still the most compelling thing a city can offer. It started with his grandmother in Singapore. Now it's everywhere, Bangkok included. Photograph: mahjongpalace There is a particular kind of household that stays with you. The kind where the door is always open, where something extraordinary is always being cooked and where, if you look through the right window on the right evening, four people are hunched over a square table, fingering tiles against a wooden surface like a low, insistent percussion.  Subhas Kandasamy grew up in one of those houses – in Singapore, with his grandmother Dolly, in a different era of the city-state, when multi-generational living was simply how things were done and the veranda looked onto a garden of mango and guava trees. That house, those evenings, that grandmother: they followed him everywhere. And eventually, they became a business. Photograph: anoukdbrouwer/mahjongpalace Mahjong Palace, the social club that Subhas founded in New York in September 2023, is not your usual Mahjong club, even for the US, and it’s certainly not a gaming den. It is not a Chinese cultural centre or a wellness concept or a members' club either – although it does borrow something from all of these.  It is, at its core, a reimagining of what it means to play mahjong in the 21st century – stripped of the money, filled with strangers who quickly stop feeling like strangers and roaming – staged wherever possible, inside galleries, museums and cultural spaces. Photograph: mahjongpalace 'It aims to get people off their phones and apps,' Subhas says, with characteristic directness. 'To promote intergenerational interaction. To foster a genuine non-digital community.' Photograph: mahjongpalace The origin story begins, as many good ones do, with a grandmother. Dolly was, by all accounts, a force of nature – 'the template Peranakan matriarch', as her grandson puts it – who ruled the household with the particular authority of someone who knew exactly how to make everything feel abundant.  Peranakan culture, born out of Chinese immigrant communities settling across the Malay Peninsula centuries ago – mixing with local Malay populations and absorbing their spices, textiles, languages and rituals into their own culture – is understandably, and famously an in-betweener. Not quite Chinese, not quite Malay. Something that carved its own distinct identity out of that in-between-ness. Subhas is drawn to that idea. After all, he himself has always straddled worlds – Singapore, Europe, the US, the art world and the domestic, the formal and the spontaneous. Photograph: mahjongpalace It is fitting, then, that the game at the centre of his life shares a similar origin story. Mahjong was born in 19th century China, most likely in the Yangtze River Delta during the Qing Dynasty, before travelling south with the Chinese diaspora across the sea routes of Southeast Asia.  By the time it reached the shophouses and clan halls of Singapore, Penang and Kuala Lumpur, it had already absorbed local inflections, adapted to new hands and new climates and settled into the rhythms of communities that were themselves in the process of becoming something new. It was never purely Chinese. It became, like the Peranakans themselves, something richer for the crossing. Photograph: mahjongpalace At Dolly's table, a mahjong set was always out. Dinner guests would drift from the food to the veranda, where the tiles were waiting. By the age of five, Subhas was standing at his grandmother's elbow during games. By seven, Dolly had – as is tradition – handed him a little money to play with.  'If I lost that money,' Subhas recalls with a laugh, 'she would absorb the loss. If I won money, I could keep the money. This is the best gambling education for children.' Photograph: mahjongpalace But the lesson was not really about gambling at all. It was about consequence, attention and the pleasure of being taken seriously at a table full of adults. Two things stayed with him from those evenings: the warm hospitality and the generous inclusivity. 'These two characteristics,' he says, 'have always influenced my hosting.' Photograph: anoukdbrouwer/mahjongpalace Before Mahjong Palace, there was the art world. Subhas spent years working in high-pressure roles at institutions including Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Superblue and Company Gallery – director of sales, the kind of position that requires both a finely tuned eye and a constitution for sustained stress. He is diplomatic but candid about what that world taught him. 'Aspects of it taught me how to never treat people,' he says. 'The entitlement and bullying that people get away with is shocking… you know who you are.' Photograph: mahjongpalace But he also credits the art world with igniting what he calls 'the hustler in me', which has come in very handy since. He made friends he still considers lifelong. And it gave him an intimate understanding of the smaller galleries and cultural spaces that, he felt, were always being eclipsed by the bigger names – an injustice he would begin to address once he went his own way. Photograph: mahjongpalace The tipping point came through the body rather than the mind. 'My husband, Martin Anderson, could tell from my happiness level in the room whether I was working on gallery work or Mahjong Palace,' he says. In December 2025, he handed in his resignation. He gave a month's notice, went to Sri Lanka for Christmas and came back someone else. 'After such a dramatic decision,' he reflects, 'returning to Asia was like going home.' Photograph: mahjongpalace Mahjong Palace had actually begun the year before, in September 2024, when Subhas emerged from a six-month break between jobs, burnt out and restless – and decided to take the mahjong lessons he had been giving friends on Sunday afternoons out into the world.  The first session: two tables, eight people, a neighbourhood restaurant in Dumbo, Brooklyn. No grand plan. Just a feeling. 'It's just going to be a friend's thing,' he told himself. Photograph: mahjongpalace It was not, as it turned out, just a friend's thing. Within weeks, messages were arriving from friends of friends who had heard about this mahjong club. Two tables became four. Four became six. Six became eight. By January 2024, the Financial Times was on the phone.  'I thought it was a joke,' Subhas says. But a joke, it was not. A cultural moment had arrived and Mahjong Palace was positioned inside it. 'I started Mahjong Palace not because I knew a trend was coming,' he is quick to clarify. 'I just wanted to bring my friends together. The fact that it hit the curve at the right time was an added bonus.' Photograph: mahjongpalace Walk into a Mahjong Palace session and you will find something that feels considered in every detail. Guests receive a welcome email in advance requesting they arrive on time. There are drinks, food, a welcome speech. In gallery and museum settings – the natural home of Mahjong Palace – a tour of the current show is played out by the curator or director before anyone sits down to play.  Then comes what Subhas describes, with evident satisfaction, as the seating plan. Tables are allocated by skill level. But there is also something more intuitive at work. 'I like pairing guests up if I think there is room for a spark,' he says. 'This is my Peranakan aunty side showing.' Photograph: mahjongpalace There is also, it should be said, a dress code – not an enforced one, but an understood one. People show up. They put on something nice. Mahjong Palace has become the kind of evening you get ready for.  'It's very much like date night,' Subhas says. 'People dress up, they come to Mahjong Palace, they know there's going to be a nice bar.' For a game that most people associate with their grandparents' back room, that reframing alone is a minor cultural coup. 'It's a very 360 experience,' he says. 'There's the food and drink, the nice bar, great Asian food. Sometimes, for up to 50 players, I still do the cooking myself – it's kind of like my love language to cook. And then for three hours, you forget about everything else and just be present in the game.' Photograph: mahjongpalace The teaching itself is systematic and also rather elegant. Subhas has designed a method that moves from the hardware to the software – you learn the tiles before you learn the game, because 'if you don't understand the hardware, how can you understand the software?' He breaks the tiles into their three categories – suits, honour cards, flowers – and then shows players the final destination before they begin. The way a driving instructor might show you the route before handing over the wheel. When someone accumulates enough points to earn a place on the leaderboard, he walks through the room and sounds a gong. The whole room erupts in cheering. 'People love seeing their name in lights,' he says. Photograph: mahjongpalace In place of money – which Mahjong Palace famously eschews to the occasional bewilderment of Asian audiences accustomed to the two being kind of inseparable – the leaderboard provides the competitive charge.  Re-educating players on this point has been, he admits, one of the harder parts of expansion. 'When I brought it to Singapore and Bangkok, everyone was like, oh, I don't want to lose so much money,' he says. 'I have to say: we're going to teach you a way to enjoy it so there's no money involved.'  The point, he insists, is that 'you can still enjoy the game immensely without the money aspect.' Photograph: mahjongpalace For someone running sessions across New York, London, Singapore and Bangkok, the logistics are, understandably, a little theatrical. Subhas travels with two mahjong sets in stainless steel cases that he describes, without a trace of understatement, as looking 'like James Bond Roger Moore era cases that carry the Cold War nuclear codes.'  He also packs two neoprene playing mats in Mahjong Palace's signature colourways, so the tables look right regardless of where he has landed. 'I get funny looks at airports,' he says. We’re not surprised. Photograph: mahjongpalace And then there’s the peculiar venues. Why galleries? Why museums? Most people, imagining a social gaming club, would go solely straight to a bar. Subhas's instinct ran elsewhere. Having watched brilliant smaller galleries be perpetually overshadowed by the big institutions, he wanted to give them a new kind of energy and a new kind of audience. 'It just seemed like my natural fit,' he says. 'I now get to engage with art in a different way.' Photograph: Subhas Kandasamy Mahjong Palace has hosted sessions at the Faurschou Foundation in New York (with Ai Weiwei's blessing), partnered with Studio Ashby in London for an early pop-up and played in Bangkok's Siri Sala, Irma Go's lovingly restored canal-side villa in Bangkok Noi. Three century-old teak houses brought back to life as a boutique guesthouse, it marked the club's Thai debut. With guests staying overnight at Siri Sala, conversations stretched into the next morning, creating a kind of intimacy and camaraderie that felt especially rare in a fast-moving city like Bangkok. Photograph: Subhas Kandasamy   Now, in what Subhas describes as a milestone moment for the club, Mahjong Palace is heading to the National Gallery in London on April 17 – a collaboration that feels like a threshold being crossed. 'They have been so wonderful to work with,' he says of the National Gallery, London, 'and their vested interest in community is so legit.'  At the event, he will also be serving Mahjong Palace's first branded ice cream – a collaboration with a company called Baobae, the flavour a meditation on Dolly's garden – pandan and coconut, mango and pineapple. 'Always with a hint of what Dolly would have cooked,' he says. What Subhas is building, at its most essential level, is a counter-argument to the digital age. He talks about the way apps and online communities create the 'false belief' that you are part of something, when true community is still, he believes, found face-to-face. Photograph: mahjongpalace The age range – anywhere from 23 to 86 in New York and London – is something he is proud of. There is now a group in London, strangers who met at a session, ranging from their twenties to their seventies, who go to dinner together, to the cinema. 'It really makes me happy,' he says. He mentions, almost in passing, that people over fifty 'start becoming invisible to the world.' He would like Mahjong Palace to push back against that. Photograph: mahjongpalace He also does not shy away from the fact that competitive games are, among other things, excellent dating tools. 'If you are going on a first date,' he says, smiling, 'you can save time by bringing your date to Mahjong Palace, because they can never disguise their personality when they're playing. It all comes out.' View this post on Instagram A post shared by I am S U B H A S (@subhversive) Bangkok, where Subhas has been spending more time as of late, feels like the next real frontier. He has already confirmed a return to Siri Sala in the first week of June and beyond that he is thinking bigger – a two-day event, his husband flying in from New York to co-host, cocktails, food, more tables.  In three years, he says, he and his husband plan to split their time between Europe and Bangkok exclusively. He already feels at home here. 'It's such a dynamic city,' he says. 'A nice mix of high culture, low culture, everything in between.' Photograph: mahjongpalace If Mahjong Palace were ever to have a permanent home in Bangkok, he knows exactly what it should feel like. 'An intersection of art, culture, food and drink,' he says. An emerging gallery, perhaps. A boutique hotel. Somewhere like the Jim Thompson Art Center.  'I feel that the role of museums has changed,' he adds and you sense he is talking about something larger than venues. 'They should become a meeting point for people to come together, especially in these times where there is so much exclusion and division in the world.' He has been around the block, as he puts it – Singapore, England, Switzerland, New York and now everywhere that two stainless steel cases can be carried through airport security without too much incident. He has worked in difficult rooms and made lifelong friends in them. He made some hard decisions, he says, because he did not want to keep waiting. 'If it doesn't work, I only have myself to blame,' he told himself on that December morning. 'But I leave with a lot of satisfaction in my heart.' That is, it turns out, the Mahjong Palace philosophy in miniature – play with abandon, don't mind losing, learn from the risk and find melody in the clacking of tiles. Mahjong Palace returns to Bangkok's Siri Sala in late May/early June 2025. We’ll share details once dates are announced and follow mahjongpalace.net for all the latest updates.

Just recently, at a whisky event that promised the usual swirl of ice and polite applause, something else cut through the room. Not a saxophone – it was thinner, stranger, almost trembling. I remember turning to a friend and asking, 'What is that?' The answer leads me to Sorrawat 'Ben' Suviporn. Ben is one of the partners behind Studio Lam, the vintage-style bar long considered a sanctuary for Thai musical heritage. For years it's been a meeting point for luk thung devotees, mor lam obsessives, jazz heads and anyone willing to let African rhythms sit beside Latin swing, funk and soul. It's a place where crates matter and curiosity is currency. Yet the sound I hear that evening doesn't come from a record collection. It comes from plants. Under the name Melt and Reform, Ben works with bioelectric signals from living organisms, translating their electrical activity into control voltage, then shaping that data through a modular system until it becomes something like music. Or perhaps something before music. The project grows out of Melt Experience, an earlier collaboration rooted in plant medicine, inner stillness and guided frequencies. Over time, the work shifted from symbolic use of natural elements to actual dialogue with Mother Nature herself. Photograph: prakaanmaltwhisky Melt and Reform feels almost alchemical. Frequencies dissolving, field recordings bending, bioelectric signals reshaped into song. I ask Ben when he first realises sound can be treated as something alive. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sorrawat Suviporn (@benbkk)  'Actually, Melt and Reform didn't begin with plant sound,' he replies. 'It started during a project my friend and I created called Melt Experience, which focused on inner peace and plant medicine.' Within that earlier project, there's a segment dedicated to guiding participants towards relaxation. Music is composed not as entertainment, but as architecture for stillness. 'We wrote four or five pieces built from frequencies, natural sounds, guided meditation elements and melodies we felt personally connected to,' he explains.   Photograph: PlantWave During that period, he encounters a device called PlantWave, a tool designed to translate plant bioelectric signals into sound. The idea lodges in his mind.    “If we are already working with plant medicine physically, consuming it, maybe it would be meaningful to also hear the sound of that plant.”   The shift is subtle yet profound. Instead of composing about nature, he begins composing with it. When I ask how he starts translating mushroom bioelectric signals into something audible, his answer is practical rather than mystical. 'I used a modular system to translate the mushroom's bioelectric fluctuations into control voltage. That signal was mapped to pitch, triggers or modulation within the patch.' Photograph: benbkk At first, it's simply experimentation. Connecting cables. Listening. Observing how unstable, slow or unpredictable the signals can be. 'From there, I gradually shaped it musically, deciding what the mushroom would influence and what I would control myself.' Why mushrooms? 'Honestly,' he admits, 'I just love their shapes and forms.' Rehearsals, he tells me, resemble a classroom more than a band practice. 'I'm still relatively new to this kind of equipment, so we're learning the tools at the same time as we're making the sound.' Photograph: benbkk There's wiring and patching, of course. Technical diagrams, voltage ranges. Yet instinct is just as crucial. 'Sometimes intuition leads to sounds that feel almost unbelievable. And sometimes we, with the plants, create something we can never recreate again which is beautiful… and slightly painful.' The idea of loss sits quietly there. Music that cannot be repeated because the organism will never respond in precisely the same way again. Photograph: benbkk Collaboration without intention How do you compose alongside an organism that has no intention to perform, yet still responds? 'It can be seen as a collaboration between plant and human, shaped by response rather than intention,' Ben replies. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Studio Lam (@studiolambangkok)   There's no narrative imposed upon the mushroom. No assumption that it wants to be heard. Instead, its electrical activity becomes part of a feedback system. A loop between voltage and touch, light and humidity. He's also worked with rice, translating its bioelectric signals into composition. Does that project change how he views everyday ingredients? 'It reframed rice not as an object, but as a dynamic system,' he says.    “The sound isn't hidden energy in a mystical sense, it's measurable electrical activity. But translating it into music changes how we emotionally relate to it.” He shares a story that lingers with me. 'I've had someone listen to the sound of a mushroom and tear up, saying it felt sad. Another person said it sounded cute. For me, that says more about the listener than the organism.' Nature, he believes, acts as a mirror. 'It reflects something already inside you.' In performance, who leads? Him, the modular system or the mushroom? 'It depends on how we design the setup.' Control, then, is fluid.   Has working with living organisms changed how he thinks about authorship? 'I still try to stay in control, but you can't control everything. Sometimes unexpected moments create results that are more interesting than what I originally planned.' Photograph: meltandreform The hardest lesson in merging technology with biology, he admits, is instability. 'Technology likes precision. But plants respond to their surroundings, light, humidity, touch, and sometimes they don't respond at all. You have to learn to work with that sensitivity instead of fighting it.' Photograph: meltandreform You don't 'tune' a mushroom, he clarifies. 'I carefully design how the signal is translated and choose the instruments I pair with the plant. But once it flows, I let the unpredictability shape the performance.'   Changing the plan, as he later puts it, 'is part of the plan.' Photograph: meltandreform Dialogue with DJ SWEED Melt and Reform isn't a solo venture. On stage, Ben is joined by DJ SWEED, whose background leans towards techno's heavier architecture. Photograph: mushroom_music_bangkok 'If I remember correctly, DJ SWEED studied music,' Ben notes. 'I think he majored in classical guitar. His musical background is very broad, and his imagination when it comes to sound is exceptional.' The pairing is unlikely on paper. Organic voltage fluctuations meeting structured sequences and trippy textures. Yet Ben describes the relationship with quiet gratitude. 'He supports me in almost every aspect of music.' Photograph: mushroom_music_bangkok Their performances are built around loose frameworks. 'We usually set a structure and leave space inside it,' he says. Negotiation happens through listening rather than argument. There are moments when the modular rig hums gently and others when percussion cuts sharply across the spectrum. The mushroom may trigger a gate that shifts the mood entirely. At times, Ben reaches a tone he feels content with and allows the organism to take over. 'That's when I feel most at peace,' he writes. Photograph: melt_experience At Wonderfruit in 2023, Melt Experience blends plant medicine, shared mindset and sound. 'People came looking for something,' he recalls. 'Some connected deeply, others less so. But overall, the sound did its work.' I ask whether Melt and Reform feels like meditation for him, or something more unruly. 'In the beginning, it felt calm,' he says. 'Almost meditative. Over time, I've learned to appreciate the raw and unpredictable side of it. It can exist in both states.' Photograph: melt_experience Bangkok's electronic landscape often favours club nights and imported names. Where does experimental, bio-interactive work sit within the city? 'I think Bangkok always seems to have space for creative work.' He doesn't position himself as part of an underground. 'I never really saw myself as belonging to any scene. I've just been living my life and doing what I enjoy. If I've survived, maybe it's just luck.' Photograph: meltandreform The machine, the mushroom and the signal chain For those of us who like to peek behind the curtain, Ben outlines his current setup in precise terms. He uses Instruō Scíon to translate bioelectric signals from plants. Electrodes pick up the organism's electrical activity and send it to Scíon, which converts it into CV and gate. That signal travels into his modular synthesiser, generating and processing sound before reaching the speakers. Photograph: Mutable Instruments Rings One of his most-used modules is Mutable Instruments Rings, often processed through Microcosm or Mimeophon. DJ SWEED's system centres around the Oxi One sequencer, sending MIDI to a 1010 Bitbox Micro and Oxi Coral for samples and synth parts. Basslines and leads are handled by multiple Elements instruments, with occasional monophonic lines from uBraids processed through Topographic Delay. “I use existing modules to translate very small electrical fluctuations into audible sound,' he says. 'I'm not building custom gear.”   How does he arrive at this configuration? 'I gradually added equipment that I thought would work. Sometimes I misunderstood what I actually needed. And yes, sometimes it was an accidental discovery.' The setup is never finished. 'I'm constantly adjusting voltage ranges, sensitivity and signal mapping.' View this post on Instagram A post shared by MELT AND REFORM (@meltandreform) Does he worry that adding more technology might dilute the conversation with nature? 'I see technology as something that can help us understand nature more deeply,' he writes. 'But I don't have plans to add anything at the moment.' On stage, the cables and blinking lights create an atmosphere bordering on laboratory theatre. Is that aesthetic intentional? 'The visual should look like that,' he replies. 'All of those elements are part of playing this kind of instrument.' Photograph: mushroom_music_bangkok There are moments when the mushroom 'plays' solo. Signals redirecting the trajectory entirely. 'Yes,' he confirms. 'Sometimes it doesn't go according to plan at all.' And yet those are often the most compelling passages. 'It reminded me that we need more direct contact with nature,' he says of the broader lesson. Not as metaphor, but as practice. For artists curious about collaborating with living systems rather than simply sampling them, his advice is surprisingly relaxed. 'Sampling the sound is good too. It's just a different way of working.' Photograph: Studio Lam Frequencies and what remains   As Bangkok prepares to say goodbye to Studio Lam this February, I ask how he's holding that ending. 'Everything has its time,' he says. 'Many good memories were created here. I think that's enough.' Is Melt and Reform, in some way, a reforming of roots rather than a farewell? 'Not really. It developed from its own path.' There's no grand narrative of rebirth. Only parallel timelines.   Photograph: Studio Lam Looking ahead, he mentions a new project in April titled City Frequencies with street artist NEV3R. The concept translates the physical act of drawing into sound. As NEV3R marks the canvas, lines become signals. The image transforms into rhythm and melody. 'Bangkok has its own frequency,' Ben says. 'Not just sonically, but in energy, rhythm and movement.' Photograph: Studio Lam Traffic, construction, engines, human breath. Layered, shifting, somehow structured. Extracted and reshaped through modular synthesis. When the last frequency fades at a Melt and Reform performance, what does he hope lingers? “I don't really have expectations. But it would be nice if they felt something, and enjoyed it” That answer stays with me longer than the technical diagrams. Because perhaps that's the quiet radicalism of Melt and Reform. Not that mushrooms can 'play' music. Not that rice contains hidden symphonies. But that listening itself might be an act of reform.  At the whisky event where I first hear his work, the room eventually returns to chatter. Glasses clink. Ice melts. Yet for a few minutes, the space feels recalibrated. As if something small and alive has spoken, and we've chosen, however briefly, to hear it.

An Austrian locksmith. A drive to capture better hiking shots. A lifelong grip on a PlayStation controller.  Simon Frühwirth was 24 when he bought his first drone. Nothing grand about it – he just wanted better shots from his hiking trips. A way to capture the mountains the way they actually felt, not just the way a camera pointed upward would see them. He started with standard drones. Then FPV came along. First Person View (FPV)  is exactly what it sounds like. Goggles on, live feed straight to your eyes. It shifts a bit from control to immersion. From steering to actual flying. View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) FPV is now his signature. You might not recognise his face – he's almost always behind the goggles, controller in hand – but you've almost certainly seen the work.  A drone moving through Thai hotels in one long unbroken take. Down corridors, across pools, up staircases, entire spaces mapped without a single cut. Effortless on screen. Anything but in practice. Now 31, drifting between cities but always somewhere in Southeast Asia and always booked solid, Simon Frühwirth is still chasing what he calls ‘the flow state’. The same feeling he first found on an Austrian hiking trail with a brand new drone and not a care in the world. This is how the right hobby, in the right hands, under an open sky, can make a life.   Let’s rewind to the moment you first picked up a drone View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) I was working as a locksmith, spending my free time hiking in the Austrian mountains and playing PlayStation (FIFA specifically). Those were my two things. Then I started wanting to actually capture the trails properly – make little videos of what I was seeing up there. Then it hit me: drones!  I got a normal one first, one of those point-and-shoot ones then FPV came later. So gaming actually trained you for flying drones? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) Yes! – more than I realised at the time.  The controller felt natural. I’d been holding a PlayStation controller for who knows how long, so the muscle memory was already there. I didn’t feel like a beginner with the controls because, in a way, I wasn’t. In a weird way, those two things made me really good at this. Hiking sparked the desire for better landscape shots and PlayStation trained my hands. I’ll make a statement here: a lot of serious drone pilots are gamers! The spatial awareness, the reflexes, reading movement quickly, it all transferred.  At what point did this turn from a passion into your profession? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) October 2024. I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to Bali. I was four years into flying drones, two of those seriously on FPV and I kept entering this flow state where it was just me and the drone. It was in Bali that I finally had room to grow into it. Daily flying built discipline and clarity around turning this into a profession.  From Bali's beaches to Bangkok's high-rises – how did that happen? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) Bangkok is a completely different conversation from Bali. Bali gives you nature mostly. Bangkok pulls you inside – vertical, dense and layered in the best way.  Hotels, high-rises, long corridors of glass and steel that make every shoot feel alive. The client appetite here is unlike anywhere else – hotels especially – and the mix of commercial work and online coaching has turned into something genuinely sustainable. FPV commercially in Bangkok is still a rare thing. But Bangkok has always had room for everything creative. Your Instagram shows you flying in real time alongside the actual footage in a split screen. What made you start editing it that way? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) Honestly, right now I'm mostly flying for work in Bangkok – hotels especially. I'm not flying for fun as much as I imagined I would be. Commercial work has its own discipline. But the thing I always come back to is my editing style on Instagram – that split screen of me in the goggles, controller in hand, working the shot. Because not many people will sit through a long drone take. But show them the feeling behind it, the moment I either catch or crash – that's where the emotion lives. The realness, behind-the-scenes stuff is what people love to see. How long before things actually took off online? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) My breakthrough took about a year – 10,000 followers just happened. I was in Bali at the time doing the exact same thing. Once it moves, it moves fast. Do you think about the algorithm or just post? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) I don’t study algorithms at all. I don’t care about them. But I do post every day, at any time. I don’t even read the comments haha!   I think when you create consistently people always see something on your page and somehow it gets rewarded. Certain videos don't blow up, certain ones do – nature of the business. The split screen is the real motion though. I just keep showing up and I genuinely think that's what got me here. What actually happens on a hotel shoot when the people in front of your lens aren't always actors? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) A lot of the prep is handled by the hotel’s marketing team before I even step on set. They choose the right people, maybe not actors, but well briefed and ready.  By the time we roll, everything is in place. Locations are locked, areas cleared, or guests informed. I focus on flying, chiming in where it helps. Two to four takes usually does it.  How heavy is the responsibility of flying commercially abroad? View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) Operating through an agency makes it easier. Most importantly, you have to carry the right insurance, you have to learn the rules and you respect them. Working through proper channels is how you build trust, which is everything when you're working with high-end hotel clients who are putting their brand in your hands. The permit process in SEA is more navigable than most people assume. Any drone casualties along the way? Broken a few. More than a few went into a pool. I’d say you don't really lose them – you just find them somewhere they really shouldn't be! What's the most intense flying moment you've had so far?   View this post on Instagram A post shared by SIMON FRÜHWIRTH ● DRONE PILOT (@simon.frwt) There's a video that went a bit viral. I'm flying from the sea and a dog comes charging out of nowhere and could possibly take the drone clean out of the air – no drones or dogs were harmed, for the record! But on top of that, it wasn't even the first take. I'd already crashed before that and switched to the backup drone. Then on that very take, the dog nearly ate that one too. Still makes me laugh. Anyone in the FPV world you genuinely rate? View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kai Kevin Goh (@kaivertigoh) Two creators I follow, @kaivertigoh and @sembler8, produce good videos and have sharp techniques. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Man from Earth 🌎 (@sembler8) If restrictions didn't exist for one day, what would you shoot?  Inside the BTS! Flying straight through the carriages, dodging the poles, going through the whole thing. That would be incredible. And honestly pretty hilarious too.

‘Seven hours,’ she answers. Not seven hours for anything with a mood board sign-off or a production crew – seven hours of concept, outfits, steaming said outfits, filming and then the editing, which is where Jaynjangle truly loses track of time and finds it completely worth it.  ‘The magic is always in the micro details,’ she says. Her comment section would agree. View this post on Instagram A post shared by JJ (@jaynjangle) Before we get into the edits and outfits – and we will – there's one detail that sets the tone for everything else. When Jaynjangle and her partner decided to move to Bangkok, they had never visited Thailand.  Not once. No scouting trip, no cautious long weekend to confirm their instincts, no boots-on-the-ground reconnaissance of any kind. Just a decision, a digital nomad visa and a shared appetite for the unknown. ‘The thought of living in a new country was scary at the time,’ she admits. ‘But when Thailand announced the DTV, it felt like perfect timing – like all the stars aligned.’ She'd been wanting to live somewhere new for years. The idea was always there, waiting for the right conditions to show up. Then they did and she moved. Just like that. Jaynjangle’s career as a content creator back in New York made it logistically possible – the flexibility, the income that travels with her – but framing the move as a lifestyle brand decision would be selling it short. It was more personal than that. A want, held for a long time, finally meeting its moment. Was there a specific moment you realised Bangkok fashion content was going to be your niche? View this post on Instagram A post shared by JJ (@jaynjangle) Fashion was already hers before Bangkok entered the picture. She'd built a niche in the U.S., refined her eye in New York, developed a voice that was less about trend-chasing and more about the quiet confidence of a well-considered outfit. When she landed in Southeast Asia, nothing swerved – it stretched. The lens widened.  ‘My content is not about telling people what to wear,’ she says. ‘It's about creating fun, expressive outfits and showing how style can feel playful and personal.’ There's a distinction in that and she means it. Jaynjangle isn't in the business of authority. She's in the business of invitation – come see what happens when you stop dressing for approval and start dressing for yourself! The city she chose happens to understand that frequency already. Did you have to completely rebuild your wardrobe when you moved? View this post on Instagram A post shared by JJ (@jaynjangle) Not entirely. But it required a ruthlessness she didn't entirely enjoy. Clothing, for Jaynjangle, isn't decor. It's a working tool. Leaving behind her heavier pieces, the dramatic overcoats and chunky knits she'd spent New York winters building a whole visual language around, wasn't sentimental exactly. It was creative. ‘Cold-weather styling has always been something I genuinely enjoy creating,’ she says and you believe her. There's a specificity to how she talks about layering that belongs to someone who misses it not for warmth but for what it allows – the architecture of a look built across multiple pieces, the depth that comes from weight and volume. Bangkok doesn't do that. Bangkok does something else entirely. View this post on Instagram A post shared by JJ (@jaynjangle) ‘Clean silhouettes, breathable fabrics, relaxed tailoring,’ she says of what she's observed in the city's aesthetic. ‘It's that 'I just threw this on’ energy – but elevated.’ She's adopted the logic without abandoning her instincts. In place of volume, she builds with colour and tailoring. In place of layers, strong silhouettes that do the heavy lifting a coat would once have done. It's the same fluency, different vocabulary. She's also been drawn to traditional Thai textiles – silk, handwoven fabrics – but wears them with a contemporary looseness. A Thai silk top with relaxed trousers rather than a full traditional silhouette. Respectful without being reverential.  Has being Korean shaped how you're perceived as a content creator in Bangkok? View this post on Instagram A post shared by JJ (@jaynjangle) This is where the conversation gets interesting. ‘Being Asian definitely shapes how I'm perceived here,’ Jaynjangle says. ‘I blend in more visually, so there's less of that automatic farang influencer label.’ The typical expat-creator in Bangkok tends to arrive loud – exoticising, opinionated, very online about a place they've known for five minutes. Jaynjangle just... isn't that. She moves through the city without friction, isn't read as a novelty and has never had to push back against a label that was never stuck on her to begin with. The quietness she talks about isn't a lack of presence. It's a different kind of freedom. She's a Korean-American creator with a New York-built aesthetic living in a city that's very much in its fashion moment right now – close enough to observe it properly, just far enough outside to see the full picture. That dual perspective runs through her references too. Creators like NYANE and Jizifanfan feed the same visual appetite as the streetwear she pulls from Hong Kong, Vietnam and Japan. A pan-Asian conversation she's genuinely part of, not just passing through. When did the cheeky edits start – and how long does a 20-second reel actually take? View this post on Instagram A post shared by JJ (@jaynjangle) About two years ago, pulled in by the internet's best rabbit hole. 'I started teaching myself after seeing so many cool edits online – the animations, the pop-ins, all of it – and I was instantly inspired,' she says. The logical next step: learn it, do it, make it her own.  

The Italian film industry doesn't do subtle. It rocks up like a Fellini fever dream – all sweeping gestures, crumbling palazzos and someone in outsize sunglasses chain-smoking whilst quoting Sartre. But occasionally it loosens the collar, ditches the silk scarf and lets a few fresh voices slip through. MovieMov – Italian Film Festival is one of those moments. Running April 21-24 at House Samyan, with English and Thai subtitles, the lineup brings just enough introspective angst to properly derail any plans for easy viewing. These aren't your standard arthouse exports either. The festival grows from initiatives involving students, young professionals and local institutions.

They don't call Thailand the Land of Smiles for nothing. In Bangkok though, those smiles graduate into real laughs when punchlines are attached to mics. The comedy scene's really become its own serious thing – intimate spots, real community, international acts rubbing shoulders with Bangkok's own while you sit close to the action with a cold one watching the barbs land softly here, harshly there. Either way, a good laugh is promised. If this sounds good, here's where to go.

  Photograph: Exotic Originals The interview wrapped, but Dave Milligan of Exotic Originals stuck around to drop his personal poster hall of fame on us. Before anything else, here’s Dave being honest: ‘It’s my personal top ten, though the order isn’t set in stone or anything. It might change tomorrow or even the day after because it's hard to narrow things down!’ With that preface, what follows are Dave’s current right-this-second rankings, courtesy of today’s Dave. Tomorrow’s Dave might shuffle the deck, swap out entries, or flip the order entirely. That restless, ever-shifting perspective is exactly what makes Exotic Originals worth circling back to. 1. Apocalypse Now (1979) Photograph: Exotic Originals Right out of the gate, we’re going nuclear. This is ‘a huge, stunning two-sheet piece by Thailand’s greatest cinema poster artist of all time’ – a certain Tongdee Panumas – and if that sounds like overblown praise, the list will make believers out of you. Quick fact drop before you go hunting on the usual online listings: ‘it was never a regular Thai size one-sheet, that’s a well-known fake’, so if someone’s peddling that story to you, run. Now, about acquiring one of these. Deep breath. ‘It’s extraordinarily rare and has changed hands for crazy money. I’m not going to state a price range here, because I think it’s massively overpriced and I don’t want to qualify this price in any way.’ Dave’s diplomatic restraint is clear here. When the market goes bananas, silence can speak louder than the numbers. But here’s the thing that transcends price tags and auction drama: ‘A lot of prolific collectors across the world have named it as the greatest film poster of all time – from any country.’ Not the best Thai poster. Not even the best Asian poster. The greatest, anywhere. Dave concludes simply, ‘It’s not difficult to see why it’s so highly revered.’  2. Mad Max (1979) Photograph: Exotic Originals   This one’s ‘another Tongdee masterclass and the pride of my collection’ and Dave’s not being modest about it. When something sits on a list this competitive, humility goes out the window and rightfully so. Why does this poster command such reverence? Well, ‘I think the entire poster is incredible,’ he says, ‘but I think the typography of the film’s title is such a standout.’ The lettering ‘is based on the aesthetic of the original international poster’s title font and with Thai script, it looks incredible.’ But it gets better. Tongdee didn’t exactly just copy the Western design and call it a day. According to Dave, ‘I think he’s improved the Western logo’s overall design massively.’ 3. Friday the 13th (1980) Photograph: Harit Three words from Dave on this one: ‘Incredible. The fonts. The colours’. Surprise, surprise! It’s ‘again, Tongdee Panumas – the guy is an absolute genius’. At this point, you start to realise that Tongdee basically owned the late ‘70s and early ‘80s Thai poster scene, churning out masterpiece after masterpiece and this one sits right at the top of that golden streak. This is the kind of poster that stops you cold. It’s not just advertising when it’s really a promise of what’s waiting in the theatre. And few posters have ever promised this hard. 4. King of Comedy (1983) Photograph: Exotic Originals ‘This is one of my favourite films of all time’, Dave says, ‘and I was very surprised that it got a Thai theatrical release’. It makes sense when he explains how ‘it’s pretty offbeat and it’s massively underrated’, though thankfully ‘a lot of fans have made sure it’s got the gold star cult classic status it deserves’. How offbeat are we talking? According to Dave, it’s ‘the most left of centre Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro film that ever happened’. And that’s saying something from a director-actor duo who’ve never exactly played it safe, wrapping it in that distinctly ‘80s media saturation anxiety that somehow feels even more relevant now. Dave’s clearly stoked about snagging this one: ‘I only recently got one of these – honestly, I never thought I’d get one. So I’m a happy boy right now!’ Oh! And the artist? ‘Again – Tongdee!’ 5. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) Photograph: Exotic Originals ‘I am a huge John Carpenter fan and I had to pick one.’ So begins this love letter to both director and designer. ‘This one is an absolute beauty and is exceptionally rarely seen’. Dave notes, though, that ‘it’s not my favourite Carpenter film and although the Thai poster for The Thing is perhaps the piece that has collectors salivating far more, given apparently only 50 were ever printed.’ There's a calculated choice happening here. ‘But I'm going by artwork here and this one wins, hands down’. It’s about the visual mastery, the composition, the way ink and paper come together to create something transcendent. Take a wild guess before we reveal the artist: ‘again the artist is Tongdee!’ Shocking absolutely no one at this point. Dave runs through the Carpenter catalogue with obvious affection – ‘Escape From New York, Halloween, They Live all had great posters too and Prince Of Darkness has an absolute acid trip of a poster, which is probably fitting for what is for me, one of the greatest horror films ever made’. He adds that ‘I have never seen a Thai poster for Halloween III: Season of the Witch’ then shares a genuine disappointment: ‘Big Trouble In Little China never had a good Thai poster – they pulled a Star Wars and just slapped Thai texts over the international artwork’ and while that original art is gorgeous, Dave would’ve loved ‘to have seen a Thai take on this one’. 6. Deep Red (1975) Photograph: Exotic Originals ‘One of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s greatest films got a simple (by Thai horror standards) yet stunning piece.’  And there’s a story here that makes this entry even sweeter. Dave says he ‘just finally found one of these and it was for French director Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter The Void) who is a regular customer.’ When Gaspar made a film with Argento last year, Dave naturally ‘offered it to him first as he had been asking about it.’ The universe aligned here, with a giallo legend's poster going to a director who had collaborated with said legend. Dave also tells us how Gaspar ‘is a lovely guy – nothing like you’d expect, the sort of character who would make such twisted cinema and a huge poster collector.’ 7. Death Wish (1974) Photograph: Exotic Originals ‘The gun in motion is badass and this is one of my favourite posters of all time.’ This one’s another all-time favourite and in a list this brutal – that means it’s staking a claim on the summit and probably never coming down. ‘I never thought I’d own one,’ Dave says and we can see the appreciation born from longing. He adds, ‘It was one of the top two on my grail list, alongside King of Comedy.’ But acquiring a grail is rarely a clean victory. ‘It’s as stunning as it is rare,’ Dave explains further. ‘It was a bit of a mess when I got it.’ Fifty-plus years had left their mark: grime, wear, all the inevitable entropy of surviving half a century. So Dave did this: ‘I had it professionally restored.’ But not just any restoration. He found Darrell Kobza: 'Darrell and I share an ethos regarding restoration – no repainting. Just a bath in a solution which doesn’t damage the paper to get fifty years plus of grot and grime out, some very minor touch-ups and a linen backing.’ The approach protects the delicate piece, makes it display significantly better, but never fundamentally alters what it is. ‘Darrell Kobza did a phenomenal job,’ Dave says and the image you’re seeing? That’s his actual piece. The gun still frozen in that badass motion blur. The grail, finally home. 8. The Beyond (1981) Photograph: Harit Bold statement incoming: ‘Horror posters do not get better than this’. We’re talking about ‘the most well known and beloved film from maverick Italian director Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy’ and ‘this is an absolute stunner, utterly iconic and has often been imitated, but never bettered’. Here, we get to credit another maestro: ‘This poster was done by legendary Thai artist Noppadol’ and in a list dominated by one genius, it’s genuinely refreshing to celebrate another master of the craft. 9. Psycho II (1983) Photograph: Exotic Originals ‘An incredibly and beautifully detailed piece for the enormously underrated sequel to the Hitchcock classic, Psycho’. Already we’re on interesting ground: sequels to untouchable classics rarely get their flowers, but here we are. Now brace yourself for this hot take: ‘Some people will call this blasphemy, but I far prefer Psycho II over the first film – a comment that would no doubt have Hitchcock spinning in his grave and get a hell of a lot of cinephiles' knickers in a twist’. But as Dave rightly points out: ‘You don’t choose what you like!’ Taste doesn’t arrive via committee approval or critical consensus! 10. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) Photograph: Exotic Originals Let’s start with a confession from Dave: ‘I must admit I am absolutely no Trekkie (that’s a name for Star Trek's hardcore fanbase), but I absolutely love this film.’ Sometimes you don’t really need the Starfleet manual to recognise greatness when it beams directly into your eyeballs. Why does Dave love it? Well, ‘it features one of the best sci-fi horror sequences of all time with the ear bugs, I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it and the performance from Ricardo Montalban as Khan is incredible. One of the best and most complex on-screen baddies of all time.’ Now, for the poster itself, Dave’s enthusiastic here: the poster is ‘unbelievable, easily the best Thai Star Trek poster and easily my favourite Thai sci-fi poster.’ According to Dave, it's ‘a masterpiece’, though the artist remains to be confirmed.  

Every dish carries a world within it: community, people, whole nations served up in flavour and tradition. Food documentaries do something vital here, showing us not just the dishes but the people who shape them, the ones keeping traditions alive, taking risks to preserve flavours that might otherwise disappear. You see it everywhere: late-night vendors working over blazing woks, home cooks carrying on what their grandmothers taught them. Every scene is thick with work, memory, devotion. Watching these stories unfold, you start to understand something important: street food only looks casual on the surface. Underneath, it’s about survival, identity and how a single, seasoned bite can tell a country’s entire story. These are the docs that speak Thailand.

These international films will scratch your travel itch until your next flight east, capturing Thailand’s multifaceted energy from neon-lit Bangkok corners to hidden island paradises you swore you’d keep secret.  Consider this your emergency travel fix until you’re back dodging tuk-tuks and hunting down the perfect mango sticky rice.

feature debut by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, emerged from the Critics’ Week sidebar with the Grand Prize AMI Paris in hand. It’s the sort of win that quietly shifts things. Not only for the filmmaker, or for 185 Films, the Thai production house behind it, but for an entire region still largely overlooked in the palmares of European festivals. Only once before has an ASEAN film claimed this prize – Malaysia’s Tiger Stripes in 2023 – which makes A Useful Ghost the second, and possibly the strangest. The story opens with March, grieving the sudden death of his wife, Nat, who succumbed to dust pollution. Soon, he discovers her spirit has returned – in the body of a vacuum cleaner. As he navigates this surreal reunion, his mother’s factory is beset by another ghost, this time a disgruntled labourer who brings operations to a halt. The family, already unsettled, rejects Nat’s lingering presence. But she, determined and oddly practical, offers to exorcise the workplace in exchange for being acknowledged – not just as a ghost, but as a partner. It’s part satire, part seance, and entirely sincere in its portrayal of loss and cohabitation. Photograph: A Useful Ghost Photograph: A Useful Ghost Critics’ Week, dedicated to first and second-time directors, has always been where oddball gems surface. Yet Thai cinema’s presence here has been sporadic. It’s been a decade since Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour was selected. That absence has made Boonbunchachoke’s entry feel not only like a revival, but a gentle rebellion – one that pairs the domestic with the spectral, the absurd with the intimate, and still walks away with one of the section’s top honours. Photograph: A Useful Ghost For Thai audiences, and indeed Southeast Asian ones, this win is more than a trophy – it’s a quiet reclamation. At a festival often preoccupied with Euro-American prestige, A Useful Ghost serves as a reminder that our stories, however eccentric or dust-choked, carry weight. Boonbunchachoke’s film doesn't pander or explain – it simply arrives, with all its cultural specificity intact, and dares to be taken seriously. It is a ghost story, yes, but also a love letter to what Thai cinema has long done best: blending the surreal with the political, the personal with the haunted, without ever losing its sense of humour or its soul.  

A ghostly trace runs through Fathom in Absence, the first in a series of guest-curated film programmes at Bangkok Kunsthalle. These are not just films, but cinematic relics from the early 2000s – forgotten, fragmented and half-remembered, like dreams recalled mid-commute. The programme resurrects four Thai experimental works, each shrouded in its own particular strangeness, screened on Saturday evenings across May (May 3, 17 and 31).  Organised in collaboration with the Thai Film Archive, the series avoids nostalgia in favour of excavation. Here, the past isn’t polished; it flickers, uneven and unsteady. Screened on Saturday evenings throughout May, each film arrives like a message in a bottle from a cinematic era many have tried to forget or never knew existed. They are not tidy cultural artefacts; they are jagged, unresolved and defiantly strange. Their return feels less like a retrospective and more like a séance. Entry is free – an invitation rather than a transaction – and each work will be shown in its original Thai with English subtitles. These are films that resist easy summary and, frankly, demand to be seen rather than explained. But if you're wondering what to expect, here's the lineup: Photograph: The Cruelty and the Soy-Sauce Man+ (2000) May 3, 7pmThe Cruelty and the Soy-Sauce Man+ (2000), directed by Phaisit Phanphruksachat Photograph: Mae Nak (1992) May 17, 5.30pmMae Nak (1992), directed by Pimpaka Towira Photograph: Kon Jorn (1999) May 17, 6.20pm (after a 15-minute intermission)Kon Jorn (1999), directed by Attaporn Thihirun Photograph: Birth of the Seanéma (2004) 31 May, 5pmBirth of the Seanéma (2004), directed by Sasithorn Ariyavicha More details about talks and discussions will be announced soon, though it’s safe to assume this isn’t the sort of programme that wraps things up with neat Q&As. Instead, it gestures towards the elliptical, the marginal and the unresolved. The Kunsthalle isn’t simply screening films – it’s calling them back. And perhaps, in watching, you’re not just a spectator. You’re a witness.

Got some free time for a Netflix night or a daytime movie date?  Here’s a solid list of feel-good Thai films from recent years, with a classic local favourite thrown in for good measure!

While music transcends borders, these Thai artists are gradually breaking down barriers and overcoming language obstacles by creating hits in English and allowing their music to resonate with global audiences. From humble beginnings fuelled by strong ambitions, these musicians are sharing their stories and taking their tracks to the world stage. Here's a snapshot of the multilingual acts from Thailand singing a slightly different tune.

Today, Thai filmmakers are pushing boundaries, addressing thought-provoking social issues and creating universally relatable stories, all while preserving their distinctive cultural voice. From the vibrant streets of Bangkok to the tranquil shores of Pattaya, these films offer a lens into Thailand’s multifaceted identity, blending the local with the global in ways that feel both personal and accessible.  Whether you’re a long-time fan of Asian film or just beginning to explore beyond Western staples, Thai cinema offers a captivating entry into a world where age-old traditions meet modern aspirations, and storytelling takes on bold, new forms.  Here’s a curated list of Thai films on streaming that you won’t want to miss.

What’s your weekend looking like? Club nights, bar-hopping or a slow wander through a flea market?  If the latter sounds more your speed, you’re in luck. Four flea markets are on the horizon, each bringing its own mix of vintage finds, handmade pieces and low-key people-watching. Here’s the breakdown of what’s coming and where you’ll want to be.

Bangkok’s book scene is having a quietly excellent moment. Beyond the usual shop-and-go routine, the city is leaning into more social, more experiential ways to read: bilingual book clubs, thriller discussions over wine and heritage spaces turned into treasure hunts for pre-loved finds. Whether you’re trying to clear a long-neglected reading pile or just want an excuse to be around people who actually finish books, there’s plenty happening right now. And with the year’s biggest fair still to come, this is just the warm-up. Here’s our reading radar for 2026 so far. 

Weekend hike merino, Korean perfumes that used to get stuck in customs, those frames everyone's been wearing on your feed – all finally in Bangkok. Done with the overseas seller and shipping limbo! Bangkok's had a steady run of new shops open these past six months. Big global flagships are popping up left right and centre. Hot on their heels, Thai brands are claiming premium mall space. The whole shopping scene is notably less same-y than before.  In celebration of this shopaholic diversity, here are the spots with technical gear that'll actually get used, beauty you can swatch before buying, tailoring that accounts for how people here are actually built. Head here when you're ready to browse or just feel like spending.

Updated February 2026: We’ve refreshed our list of the best record stores in Bangkok to keep you on top of the best new spots to dig. Recent additions include Recoroom Vinyl & Vintage Audio and Format BKK, as well as a special entry Cassette Shop for those who prefer their music on tape. Running your fingers along the spines, hearing that faint crackle as the needle meets the groove. It's a pleasure analog music lovers know can't be replicated by any streaming service. Unless you’ve been living under a digital rock, you’ll know that record shops in Bangkok are making a serious comeback. Communities for people who speak the same language, they’re where you’ll find vinyl lovers digging and poking through grooves new and old in search of a hot release or rare first pressing.  From old-school institutions that have been around since your parents' day to hidden underground spots brimming with character, the city's vinyl scene is thriving in ways you might not expect. Whether you're into jazz, soul, indie, international releases or boundary-pushing molam, Bangkok's got you covered. We've rounded up the very best record shops across the city, from the well-loved classics to the newer spots making serious waves. Trust us, there's enough here to keep any crate digger happy for hours. We update this article regularly to ensure the information remains accurate and current. So grab your tote bag and get ready to hunt for some proper analogue joy. Your next favourite album is out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered.   RECOMMENDED: Coolest vinyl bars in Bangkok  The best listening bars in Bangkok  Vinyl digging in Chiang Mai

For a long time, brides looked elsewhere for the beautiful white dress. Paris, Milan, New York. The assumption was that the best had to come from somewhere far away – as if beauty and craftsmanship couldn't possibly exist here. But they do. They always have. Thai designers understand the weight of tradition without being confined by it. And perhaps most importantly, there is something meaningful about entrusting your wedding dress to hands that understand your context, your story and your visual language, whether you have lived here your whole life or chosen Bangkok as home. Bangkok is not playing when it comes to bridal. Push open an unassuming workroom door and you will find heritage embroidery, stitched patiently by hand. A few streets over, the scene flips. Sleek studios. Clean lines. Romance on one end, razor sharp minimalism on the other and everything in between. The best part is you are not scrolling through samples or waiting on updates from another continent. You are sitting across from the designer. You are touching fabrics, pinning ideas, changing your mind. It is collaborative. It is personal. It is made around you. Here are 10 Thai bridal brands to know – especially if that big day's on the horizon.

Before stepping onto a stage, Lisa – Thailand’s most celebrated export and the weapon in BLACKPINK’s arsenal – paused for a brief exchange with Louk Golf, the English tutor turned pop-culture fixture. He handed her a simple gift: a hand-woven bamboo fan, the words ‘ruay nat’ woven boldly across its surface. In the southern dialect, the phrase translates to ‘super rich’, a tongue-in-cheek blessing that doubles as a knowing wink to her global success. He added a message at once earnest and self-aware: ‘I will always be one of your biggest fans.’ It sounds almost too neat – the world’s most bankable pop star holding up a provincial handicraft – but Lisa’s career has been built on making such coincidences feel inevitable. She only has to pose with a toy or glance at a snack for it to become a trend. The Labubu doll, once a niche collector’s item, became an international obsession after she was seen cradling one. In the strange economy of fandom, her choices can swell into global movements. A woven fan from southern Thailand may be next.   Photograph: Dasdnn     The object itself is hardly glamorous. For generations, Thais used fans like these to stir flames in village kitchens or to fight the heavy heat of April afternoons. They were practical, cheap, unfussy. Bamboo, abundant and forgiving, was split into strips and threaded into shape. Patterns grew more elaborate over time but the purpose remained humble: something to keep the air moving. Now, by sheer accident of celebrity proximity, the fan has slipped into the category of soft power – cultural artefacts that travel not by trade negotiations but by charm. The particular fan in Lisa’s hand came from Dasdnn, a small shop in Songkhla. The city itself is layered with ruins, shrines and a shoreline dotted with fishing boats, but Dasdnn leans away from postcards and into parody. Four friends opened it as a kind of anti-souvenir store, its interior styled like a village general shop. Their motto, ‘Something that is so common.’    Photograph: Dasdnn Photograph: Dasdnn   Photograph: Dasdnn Their catalogue speaks to this philosophy. Alongside bamboo fans in slang-splashed versions – ruay nat (super rich), yenn nat (super cool), bai jai nat (very happy) – they sell elephant pants refashioned as ‘mermaid pants’, socks patterned with mudskippers, and shrimp crisps cheekily labelled ‘mermaid meat’. There is satire at play, but also affection. In treating banality with reverence, they argue that culture is not locked inside temples or festivals but sprawled across the unremarkable. The store sits between equally idiosyncratic neighbours: Nusantara, a record shop with ties to a beloved listening bar, and Grandpa Never Drunk Alone, a watering hole whose name alone feels like a short story. Together they form a pocket of Songkhla where nostalgia, humour and local identity intersect – a reminder that provincial cities, so often flattened into ‘heritage’ or ‘beach towns’, are far messier and more alive.   Photograph: Dasdnn   Lisa’s fan, then, is not just a meme in waiting but a bridge. It joins the handmade with the hyper-global, the village craft with the Instagram story. What Dasdnn attempts – reframing ordinariness as desirable – is exactly what her gesture achieved in a second. The image of her holding the fan elevates an object once confined to markets and kitchens into something worth coveting. There is something faintly comic about the whole scene. A superstar whose choreography is dissected by millions holds up the very tool Thai grandmothers once used to keep mosquitoes at bay. Yet perhaps this absurdity is the point. Culture, at its liveliest, is rarely dignified. It spills from the street, the stall, the side alley. Dasdnn’s fans remind us that what we dismiss as mundane can resurface, with the right push, as emblematic. What Lisa picks up next is anyone’s guess – another toy, a snack, perhaps a shirt bought off a roadside stall. But the fan already demonstrates how cultural currents can shift overnight. A small shop in Songkhla did not set out to conquer the global market, but its objects now travel further than its founders could have plotted. Fame and folkcraft collided, and for a moment the world looked at bamboo differently.

Exciting news for fashion lovers in Thailand and Southeast Asia! French fashion powerhouse MM6 Maison Margiela has officially launched its first standalone store in the heart of Bangkok at Siam Discovery. MM6 Maison Margiela, the cool and contemporary diffusion line of the iconic Maison Margiela, has been redefining fashion since its launch in 1997. Created by Belgian designer Martin Margiela and Jenny Meirens, MM6 is all about bending the rules with deconstructed garments, visible seams, inside-out tailoring, and asymmetric silhouettes. It’s edgy, rebellious, and effortlessly chic – perfect for making a bold statement with just one standout piece. Step inside the new MM6 space, and you’ll be transported into a world where fashion meets art and architecture! Black lacquered concrete flows through the lower walls, contrasted with sleek white LED tubes for a dramatic interplay of textures. Recycled and upcycled materials take center stage, with fabric panels and cellulosic waste transformed into sculptural elements. The minimalist aesthetic and striking design mirror MM6’s ethos – turning everyday concepts into extraordinary creations. If you’re a fan, it’s well worth a visit, as the store presents its Avant Première Spring/Summer 2025 collection – a fresh take on classic clothing, transformed into bold and new shapes. From ready-to-wear and accessories to footwear, leather goods, and jewelry, the all-gender collections offer something for everyone.

Cult coffee shop Café Kitsuné is set to open the first Bangkok branch on the ground floor of Emquartier by the third quarter of this year. Starting off as a record label in France, Maison Kitsuné is globally known among style-and-music-savvy individuals for Paris-meet-Tokyo fashion influence. The clothing brand has imprinted its presence in fashion destinations around the world from Paris, to Tokyo and to New York. The brand is recognized by the iconic fox logo (kitsuné means fox in Japanese) which symbolizes versatility, taking a reference from Japanese mythology in which foxes are believed to possess the ability to shape shift into human. Replacing DVF clothing store at Emquartier will be the new brick-and-mortar store of Maison Kitsuné. A part of the fashion retail will be taken over by Café Kitsuné – the café spin-off of the chic fashion label. Few details are available about the food and drinks provided at the café but we expect the iconic fox-shaped snacks served alongside quality-brewed coffee that you can enjoy while grooving to slick playlist. The store and the café are expected to open in third quarter of 2020. We will keep you up to date with more detail.   View this post on Instagram Keep your daily drinks warm longer with our Café Kitsuné Tumblers ♨️ A post shared by Café Kitsuné (@cafekitsune) on May 12, 2020 at 2:16am PDT  

Burberry has started taking sustainable production in stride. The British brand’s spring 2020 collection includes 26 new products—from jackets to bags to glasses—that were made using sustainable and biodegradable materials such as bio-acetate, reused plastics, and recycled PET bottles and fishing nets. This capsule collection, called ReBurberry Edit, are identified by a special pistachio-colored label.    Burberry       Burberry       Burberry   See more on www.burberry.com

MBK Center is leaning into what people love most about shopping in Bangkok with a new high-season campaign shaped by real visitor insights. ‘Step into Thainess – Shop like a Thai’ highlights the warmth, charm and cultural buzz that define the city, inviting everyone to experience one of Bangkok’s OG malls through a more expressive, Thai-style lens. Shopping with real Bangkok energy The campaign video draws directly from Google Reviews, celebrating the moments that keep MBK on every must-visit list: smiling bargains, casual chats with vendors, discovering Thai crafts and walking away with more stories than souvenirs. CMO Puttachad Srinisakorn notes that MBK is more than a mall. It’s been a cultural destination for decades that houses a lively mix of visitors and vendors from all walks of life. MBK’s popularity is backed by major recognitions, including the Travelers Choice Awards 2025 in the Things to do in Bangkok category on Tripadvisor and the Trusted Thailand certification from the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Inside, the offer is sprawling: explore floors dedicated to fashion, IT gadgets, and souvenirs, or unwind at premium beauty clinics and spas. Foodies can dive into the famous Food Legends by MBK, a hub of legendary street-food staples. Inclusivity is key here – the center is fully equipped with dedicated prayer rooms and a wide variety of certified Halal dining options, making it a welcoming stop for everyone. Photograph: MBK Center Culture sits at the heart of the experience. Free Khon performances take over the mall on the last Thursday of every month, while Muay Thai Fight Night fills the plaza with energy on the first and last Wednesday. Both events showcase Thailand’s heritage in a setting that feels open and accessible, and unmistakably Bangkok. With ‘Step into Thainess – Shop like a Thai,’ MBK Center blends culture, lifestyle and retail into one place. It captures the joy of shopping the Thai way and brings that familiar Bangkok spark to the holiday season. For more information, visit www.mbk-center.co.th or follow @mbkcenter on Instagram

Want the luxury experience without the eye-watering price tag typical of 5-star hotels in major cities around the globe? Bangkok is home to some of the world’s leading hospitality brands offering levels of service perhaps unmatched elsewhere. But here’s the twist: Bangkok is also incredibly great value for money. Joining the ranks among Time Out’s best cities list, seasoned travellers will be quick to notice that it stands out for being one of the best places to visit in the world at far less than you might expect to pay elsewhere. So we set ourselves a challenge: find the best hotels in Bangkok where a night typically costs B10,000 or less, but the experience feels far beyond the room rate. In places like London, New York or Paris, this price point might barely get you a decent boutique room, but here that same budget unlocks a very different level of hospitality.  Sprawling suites, river views, award-winning dining, museums, galleries and parks all within arms reach – the options are vast but our criteria are simple: exceptional rooms that feel more luxurious than the rate suggests and something you can brag about when you get back home. So, whether you’re visiting the city or planning a blowout staycation, these hotels prove that Bangkok might just be the best place in the world to experience a city stay without that eye-watering check-out bill.  

Bangkok has no shortage of recognition for its hospitality – there are lists for the best hotels, stars for the best restaurants and awards for must-visit bars. But what if you want it all in one place? This is the first list of its kind: Time Out’s guide to the best hotels in Bangkok, where exceptional dining and bar experiences come together under one roof. We're talking about places where you can check in, drop your bags and have no reason to leave – not because you're lazy, but because everything you want is already there. This is  Time Out’s ‘Ultimate Bangkok: Under One Roof’ 2025 list. Our judging criteria were simple: every hotel on this list offers top-rated rooms, at least two notable restaurants and a bar that goes beyond the basics. These are the stays where you can wake up to a perfect breakfast, spend the afternoon poolside with a cocktail, and end the day with a tasting menu you’ll still be thinking about next week. Whether you’re visiting the city or planning a luxe staycation, this is your all-in-one guide to Bangkok’s most indulgent hotel experiences.

When it comes to hotel awards, Bangkok properties are never far from the spotlight. The city is packed with everything from budget stays to ultra-luxe escapes. This year, the French guide La Liste released its 2025 ranking of the world’s finest places to stay, with Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok standing out as the only establishment from Southeast Asia to make the cut. Known for its annual list of the world’s top 1,000 restaurants, La Liste uses the same algorithm-based approach for its hospitality ratings. The guide compiles thousands of critic reviews, expert insights and guest feedback. It also aggregates and analyses data from over 400 international sources, ensuring an objective evaluation that transcends cultural preferences and regional biases. ‘Our algorithm doesn’t lie: these establishments truly represent the pinnacle of global hospitality,’ said La Liste’s founder Philippe Faure. ‘Each transcends the simple concept of accommodation to offer a transformative experience to its guests.’ For its inaugural year, the accolade crowns ten properties worldwide with a top score of 99.5 – six in Europe, two in the Americas and two in Asia. A big shoutout goes to Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok, which is not only one of just two Asian stays but also the only one representing Southeast Asia.Mandarin Oriental Bangkok is no stranger to international acclaim. Located on the historic Chao Phraya River, it stands as a living legend of Asian hospitality. Despite changes over the years, the place continues to uphold a 145-year tradition of dedicated service that remains Bangkok’s beating heart.Here’s the full list of the world’s best hotels in 2025, according to La Liste La Réserve, Paris The Connaught, London The Savoy, London Cheval Blanc, Paris Il San Pietro di Positano, Positano J.K. Place Capri, Capri Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok The Peninsula, Shanghai The Peninsula, Chicago Rosewood Mayakoba, Cancun

Capella Bangkok has been crowned World’s Best Hotel and Asia’s Best Hotel according to the popular award site, 50 Best. 50 Best is a “best of” site that combines the collective views of hundreds of curated voters worldwide, including travel journalists, hoteliers and travel specialists. Their votes determine the winner of “The World’s 50 Best Hotels,” announced yesterday, Sep 17, at London’s Guildhall. Although a prestigious claim, Capella Bangkok is no stranger to winning awards. Since opening in 2022, the hotel has taken home many awards, notably making it to eleventh place on The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2023.  Today, despite tough competition, Capella Bangkok climbed to the top of the list, claiming the No.1 spot and the title of the best hotel in the world for 2024. Aside from Capella Bangkok, the city earns another three hotels on the list, including Mandarin Oriental Bangkok (No.12), Four Seasons Bangkok at Chao Phraya River (No.14) and The Siam (No.26). Overall, hotels in Asia performed the best, with 19 hotels making it to the Best 50 list this year, including Rosewood Hong Kong (No.3), Raffles Singapore (No.6) and Aman Tokyo (No.7). 50 Best has long produced rankings for restaurants and bars, with the first awards presented in 2009. Hotels is a relatively new addition to their growing number of award lists, with The World's 50 Best Hotels entering its second year this year.  When it comes to voting, any hotel anywhere in the world is eligible as long as somebody on the voting panel has stayed there at least one night. Hotels cannot pay to be selected and the results are an anonymous list of votes from 600 industry-related individuals, selected by 50 Best for their expertise in the international hotel scene.  You can check the complete list on The World's 50 Best Hotels. 

After decades of sitting idle, the old customs house on the banks of Chao Phraya River is finally getting a new lease of life. The 136-year-old building is getting the refresh it deserves as it transforms into The Langham Hotel, due to open in 2026. Built in 1888, the Old Customs House was once used for royal events, including one to celebrate the return of King Rama V from his travels in Europe. The building was designed by architect Joachim Grassi in a neo-Palladian style, with teak floors, a grand central staircase and a four-storey corridor. The Langham Hospitality Group (LHG), which has more than 30 Langham hotels around the world, is known for its work in preserving old buildings and turning them into luxury hotels. They have partnered with Rabbit Holdings for their first Bangkok project. In parallel with the old Customs House, the Langham Hospitality Group is also restoring the old post office building. The hotel will offer 78 guest rooms. For dining, they are bringing in T'ang Court, a Cantonese restaurant from Hong Kong with three Michelin stars. The Langham wellness retreat, Chuan Spa, will also be available here. This year alone, Bangkok has seen several new luxury developments, including Dusit Central Park; One Bangkok; Aman Nai Lert Residences Bangkok; Porsche Tower Design, which is selling condos starting from B500 million; and EA Gallery atop the Empire Tower, which is bringing Nobu restaurant to the city. Although the rates for this new Bangkok property are yet to be published, prices at other Langham locations around the world range between B8,000 and B40,000 per night.

The slick American boutique brand brings a slice of retro-hip edge to Sathorn.

The thing about COVID-19 is that it still remains largely mysterious. The virus emerged out of nowhere, seemingly around the end of 2019, and then it swept up the entire world in the blink of an eye at the start of 2020. It’s been some time since the pandemic broke out and yet we still can't pin down for sure where and how the virus originated, let alone how it can be cured. And until medical experts can come up with a safe vaccine, COVID-19 will be a huge part of our lives. Thailand, however, has been more fortunate in its dealings with Monsieur C-19 than other parts of the world. The country is gradually easing up on lockdown constraints in its bid to return to “normal”, including constraints on inbound travel. Authorities have recently lifted border restrictions, allowing residents to return, but mostly for necessary purposes like work or to reunite with family. But the one thing Thailand still strictly holds on to is mandating a 14-day self-quarantine in authority-credited locations for all incoming travelers. The government is kind enough to facilitate free accommodations for these returning passengers, but luxury hotels and resorts in Bangkok and other provinces also offer Alternative State Quarantine (ASQ) packages for those who are more particular with their preferences. To help those planning to fly back to Thailand, we’ve rounded up 15 top hotels in Bangkok that offer all-inclusive ASQ packages. Let’s take a look.

The stunning, brand-new Waldorf Astoria Bangkok shoots up from the bustling Rachaprasong intersection like a flower; in fact, it was designed to look like one—a magnolia, to be exact. Inside, design elements by Hong Kong-based architect Andre Fu—such as wrought iron sculptural panels and an assortment of intricate chandeliers—pay homage to local Thai culture as well as the Waldorf legacy. The property boasts 171 rooms and suites, each with interactive entertainment systems, well-stocked mini bars and sprawling bathrooms with rainfall showers, high-tech toilets and toiletries by Salvatore Ferragamo. Guests have access to three restaurants, two bars and a tea room lounge; our favorites are the Front Room, a lobby-level eatery serving innovative Nordic-Thai fare, and the top floor Champagne Bar, offering flutes of bubbly to be enjoyed on plush green velvet couches overlooking the city below. A small (three rooms) but lovely spa sits next to the open air, rooftop pool, scattered with giant wicker chairs and affording one of the best views from the property. There's also a 24-hour fitness center, as well as the aforementioned lounge, Peacock Alley, perfect for whiling away the hours between city exploration and dinner—look for the clock behind the bar, a quiet nod to the storied hotel brand's first property in Manhattan (every Waldorf Astoria has a version of the first location's beautiful wall clock).  Time Out tip: Book ahead at the spa and the Front Room, both popular must-d

W Bangkok integrates twisted Thai culture with quirky Western motifs

The Okura Prestige Bangkok has set a new standard for luxury hotels