Art exhibitions this August

Our debut exhibition, born from the heart of Time Out Bangkok, arrives as part of the Capture Bangkok celebration. 10 of the city’s most visionary street photographers join forces with the campaign’s winners, each peeling back the layers of the city to reveal its hidden poetry. In their frames, traffic snarls become rhythm, tangled wires weave romance and fleeting moments of calm surface amid the city’s relentless rush. It’s a fresh lens on a familiar place – one that invites you to see Bangkok anew, to feel its pulse in unexpected ways. This project is a labour of love brought to life alongside Canon and Coca-Cola, celebrating the restless creativity that makes Bangkok not just a city, but a living story.

August 8-20. Free. The Corner House Bangkok, 8am-11pm

In Bangkok, something strange is happening on the banks of the Chao Phraya – and it’s glowing blond. Iconsiam has become ground zero for Dragon Ball fever, hosting the largest exhibition the franchise has ever staged. A full-throttle homage to the Super Saiyan universe in all its loud, spiky, slow-motion glory. Iconic battle scenes have been pulled from the anime and built to scale, letting visitors wander through Namek like it's Sunday shopping. More than 40 life-sized figures lurk in corners and float mid-air, poised for battle or just waiting to be in your selfies. There's Kamehameha practice, a Dragon Ball scavenger hunt via app, even fusion zones. It’s half playground, half pilgrimage – and entirely designed for those who never quite left their Goku era behind. 

Until October 19. B400-1,110 via here. Attraction Hall, Iconsiam, 10.30am-8.30pm

Somewhere between silence and stillness, William Barrington-Binns has carved out a space that resists urgency. Each piece is a quiet act of devotion, the product of more than 60,000 hours spent in meticulous repetition, in what he describes as ‘art with breath.’ Rooted in the Japanese notion of Takumi – that deep, almost monastic pursuit of mastery – the work edges close to ritual. Photography and digital process are tools, yes, but they behave more like instruments in a windless orchestra, reverberating with something just beneath the surface. The result is deceptively simple. Still images that somehow seem to exhale, holding time like it’s a bird in the hand.

August 9-October 1. B120-300 at the door. 5/F, MOCA Bangkok, 10am-6pm

Hornse is 26, but her work feels more  than that – not in the sense of age, but in the way it sits with feeling. Her solo exhibition arrives like a whisper: gentle, uncertain and deeply human. These are paintings, prints, installations and letters that don’t demand your attention so much as they wait for it – quietly, like someone standing in the rain, not expecting an umbrella. There’s something of a fairy tale here, but not the happy-ending kind. More the wistful pages in-between, where nothing is said aloud but everything is felt. Grief without drama. Longing without resolution. Her images hang in the space like unsent letters, heavy with the things people never quite manage to say. You don’t so much view the exhibition as overhear it – like a secret half-spoken, still echoing.

Until August 22. Free. Art Focus Bangkok, Rivercity Bangkok, 10am-8pm

MIYABI’s solo exhibition feels less like a statement and more like a quiet return – to instinct, to breath, to the parts of the self we forget until something wild reminds us. Her work drifts between the external and the internal, sketching out a forest that exists both in the world and within the body. Birds are everywhere – perched in brushstrokes, embedded in clay, hovering just out of reach. They aren’t decorative. They’re messengers, mirrors, sometimes ghosts. The show unfolds in paintings, ceramics and mixed media that speak softly but persist, like the sound of wings in the distance. This isn’t environmentalism as warning siren. It’s slower, more intimate – a memory, a sensation, a spiritual echo. The earth fades, and with it, something internal dims too. MIYABI asks us to notice, and maybe, to return.

August 8-September 9. Free. Ground Bangkok, 7.30am-5pm 

This isn’t Thai classical dance as we’ve seen it, encased in gold leaf and museum glass. It’s a ritual reimagined for the touchscreen era, where the sacred arrives not on a pedestal but through augmented reality, virtual shrines and audience whispers typed into phones. What if worship no longer needed incense or temple bells? What if a dancer could carry your wish to the divine like a courier of intention, moving not for spectacle but for meaning? Mali Bucha rewires the idea of dance as offering. Each night becomes its own negotiation – between the human and the digital, the performer and the unseen. No two evenings repeat. It’s ritual, but alive, responsive and unsettlingly intimate.

August 15-16. Free. Chulalongkorn University, 8pm

Two artists, two worlds – Tum Ulit and Luo XianBing come together in a quiet dialogue shaped by light and connection. Their duo exhibition draws inspiration from Your Name, that delicate dance of strangers bound by invisible threads. Here, light isn’t just illumination but a metaphor for presence – the kind that heals, supports and fills the spaces others leave behind. Like the film’s characters, separated by time yet intertwined through shared experience, their work explores understanding without words. Tum’s acrylic paintings spin stories around pairs of figures navigating this unspoken bond, while Luo’s coloured pencil drawings and felt sculptures give form to a silent girl – a reminder that emotion needs no language to resonate. Together, they offer a space where empathy glows softly, insistently, across cultures and silence alike.

Until August 31. Free. ARCH Gallery, Rivercity Bangkok, 10am-8pm

The museum unfolds as a labyrinth of light and dimension – more a playground for perception than a traditional gallery. Its claim to fame lies in glasses-free 3D projection, technology that lets visitors witness three-dimensional worlds without the crutch of lenses. Inside, over 20 distinct rooms each offer a fresh lens on time and space, asking how these fluid concepts reshape the way we see and inhabit reality. The centrepiece is the Spatiotemporal Tunnel – a cavern of towering LED screens pulsing with shifting scenes. From ancient glaciers to neon-drenched cyber cities, swirling cosmic dust to dinosaurs in motion, it’s a continuous loop of visions that bend and stretch the very fabric of presence. Here, reality doesn’t just get displayed – it’s remade in real time, a dance between the eye and the ephemeral.

Open daily. B199-599 at the door. B/F, Seacon Bangkae 10.30am-9.30pm

Beneath the polished veneer of history lies a terrain scarred by violence and silence. This exhibition excavates the emotional, political and spiritual debris left by authoritarian rule and broken ideologies – where dreams have rotted, power clings like rust and collective memory becomes a host for parasites. A striking collage stitches together pixelated portraits of Thailand’s military prime ministers, their blurred faces overlaid on a fragmented female form – a haunting symbol of sexuality erased and controlled under Cold War patriarchy. This decay seeps from past to present, a toxic residue of militarism embedded in the nation’s very flesh. There are no tidy resolutions here. Instead, the work unsettles, challenges and disrupts – a disillusioned landscape where history exhales through its own poisonous remains, inviting us to confront an unstable past and a future already lost.

Until September 20. Free. Gallery VER, midday-6pm

In a world unsettled by pandemic aftershocks and tangled geopolitical currents, the old maps of power no longer hold. The centre has fragmented – replaced by a chorus of voices, each rooted in local soil, language and memory. What was once dismissed as peripheral now pulses with its own knowledge, its own beauty and fierce creative force. This project turns to those places – not for spectacle, but for something more intimate. It seeks out the forms of beauty that rise naturally from the everyday: myths whispered through generations, folktales carried on the wind, histories folded into daily rituals. These are aesthetics born not to dazzle global markets but to honour deep connections – to land, sky and the collective stories that bind us all.

Until October 10. Free. 7/F, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 10am-8pm

Helen Grace and Phaptawan Suwannakudt weave a conversation across five decades – a dialogue charting the shifting tides of gender roles in Australia, Thailand and Hong Kong. Their exhibition unfolds through a collage of personal memories and historical moments, layered with sound, image and objects that trace the displacements of time and place. Together, they build an expansive installation: sculpture, video projections and fragments of memory entwined like the lives they’ve lived. Wars endured, motherhood embraced – destruction and creation mirrored in their collaboration, felt as a kind of destiny. Their stories span worlds: Thailand, Australia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia – regions opening to each other, reshaping a global map. Amid this, a dream of borderless connection emerges, fragile and luminous, just before shadows creep in. The work breathes in folding screens and flickering video – mediums that hold space for their shared histories and hopes.

August 14-November 26. Free. 9/F, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 10am-8pm

People You May Know, the podcast that drifts between humour and hard truth, has slipped off the airwaves and into something physical. In collaboration with AP Thailand, FAROSE Studio presents an exhibition that reimagines historical legacy as something both tactile and oddly intimate. You walk through rooms divided not by time or region, but by impact. The Visionaries. The Bridge Builders. The Hidden Figures. The Revolutionaries. It’s not a history lesson – it’s a curated encounter with those who nudged the world forward, whether the spotlight found them or not. At the entrance, you’re handed a copy of The Class of the Rich (Stories) and a green highlighter – an invitation to choose your own icons, quietly, without ceremony. 

Until August 17. Free. TCDC, 10.30am-7pm

By all accounts, Bangkok wasn’t meant to become the epicentre of experimental documentary. And yet here we are, while most of the city hides indoors from the rain or queues up for iced coffee, a quiet cultural rebellion is about to begin.

What the Doc! (WTD!) – Thailand’s first-ever international documentary film festival – isn’t here to play by the rules. In fact, it wants to rip them up entirely. Running from August 22-31, this inaugural edition promises something thrillingly unpolished: real stories told by filmmakers who aren’t interested in being polite.

18 documentaries – six Thai, 12 international – will go head-to-head for top honours, and not a single one is here for background noise. These are bold, opinionated, often unpredictable works, picked from a staggering 1,599 submissions. They're not just ‘in’ competition – they ‘are’ the competition. No streaming, no replays, no safety nets. You show up or you miss out.

There’s serious money on the line, too. Feature and short-length winners will walk away with B200,000 in their back pockets, with a jury prize of B180,000 close behind. There's also B100,000 waiting for the best female director, and another for the film that goes greenest – because yes, apparently saving the planet is also a genre now.

The brains behind this ambitious move? Documentary Club with support from THACCA, the Department of Cultural Promotion, the Ministry of Culture of Thailand, Chamnong Rangsikun Foundation, Koh-Kae and White Light Studio. Together, they’re less interested in prestige and more in possibility – hoping to map out the sprawling, strange, deeply human landscape of documentary filmmaking in its most varied forms.

Is it the next Sundance? We don’t know. But What the Doc! is about to make Thailand’s documentary scene less National Geographic, more ‘hold my beer’. And honestly, thank God.

You can find the full programme on the WTD! Website right here. Screening locations will be revealed soon.

There’s a curious magic in stepping back millions of years – a chance to wander a world before ours, where giant creatures roamed freely. This event offers just that: an immersive trek alongside Thai dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, as if the clock has unwound to a forgotten era. Each step pulls you deeper into a landscape shaped by colossal terrestrial rulers, their shadows still lingering in the imagination. It’s less a simple exhibition and more a portal to ancient earth, where awe and curiosity collide. For anyone who’s ever been fascinated by the primeval, this is an invitation to experience wonder unfiltered – a rare glimpse of a world lost but never forgotten. July 1-November 2. B150-350 at the door. Museum Pier, 10am-6pm

Some melodies never quite leave the room. Long after the curtain falls, The Phantom of the Opera lingers – its music, its mystery, its chandelier hanging in the mind like a half-remembered dream. Since its premiere nearly four decades ago, the show has mesmerised over 160 million people across 47 countries, slipping between 21 languages without ever losing its voice. Bangkok first met the Phantom in 2013. Now, in 2025, he returns. Tero Scenario brings the iconic production back to the Thai stage, inviting both loyal devotees and curious newcomers to step once more into the shadowy splendour of the Paris Opera House. Grand, gothic and unapologetically emotional, it remains a reminder of theatre’s ability to thrill, unsettle and completely possess.

August 5-31. B1,800-7,000 via here. Muangthai Rachadalai Theatre

Once a printing house, now a memory pressed between tiled floors and wooden stools – this exhibition remembers Thai Wattana Panich not just as a building, but as a beating heart of knowledge production. Tucked in the centre of Bangkok, it served as a quiet engine of authority, where language wasn’t simply used but standardised. Today, the show asks what happens when the direction shifts – when words don’t trickle down from textbooks, but bubble up from tweets, slang and subtitled memes. It’s not just about nostalgia; it’s about power, who holds it, and who gets to redefine it. In one room, a narrow reading space mirrors cramped living quarters. Visitors must squat to read. It’s a subtle nod to who language once excluded, and who now rewrites the rules from the bottom up. There are games, too. Of course. Until Aug 17. Free. Bangkok Kunsthalle, 2pm-8pm

It begins as a forest, though not quite the kind you step into with boots and insect repellent. This one is built indoors, thick with light and shadow, where the air smells faintly of rain and the perfumes of Phu Ta Wan. The exhibition imagines Thailand’s tropical rainforest as something more than a landscape – it becomes a stand-in for the human mind, layered and restless, full of places that rarely see daylight. Between glowing installations and slow-moving colours there are questions hidden in mirrors, small quizzes that promise to show you something you didn’t realise was there, seven bottled scents that behave like riddles. By the end you leave a message behind, a scrap of yourself offered up to the trees, as if they might answer back.

Until August 24. Free. Rivercity Bangkok, 10am-8pm

There’s a certain kind of visual maximalism that doesn’t beg for attention so much as demand it – Hugo Brun’s work is exactly that. Loud in the best way, his pieces flirt with chaos: clashing colours, cartoonish proportions and the bold swagger of pop art unbothered by subtlety. His furniture sits somewhere between sculpture and set piece – chairs that feel like they might wink at you, tables that seem halfway to melting. It’s no surprise they’ve become backdrops for a thousand selfies, but there’s more to them than surface spectacle. Beneath the gloss and playful disorder lies a wink to nostalgia, a rebellion against beige interiors, and the refusal to be tasteful in a world that insists you should be. Burn isn’t decorating – he’s declaring.

Until October 18. Free. River City Bangkok, 10am-8pm

Sculpted from wood and shaped by scientific observation, Peerapong biomorphic forms straddle the line between relic and warning, tangled in the quiet grief of ecological collapse. These aren’t merely artworks; they are elegies for forests cleared, rivers choked, soil stripped bare. Deforestation, monoculture, pollution – they seep through the grain like ghosts. Originally rooted in Northern Thailand, the sculptures have been lifted from earth to concrete, now standing uneasily within the sterile geometry of a gallery. They appear both sacred and displaced – like offerings misplaced on the wrong altar. The installation turns the white cube into a kind of greenhouse, less for growth than reflection. What does it mean, they seem to ask, when nature must be framed to be noticed at all?

Until August 31. Free. MATDOT Art Centre, 10am-6pm

This mini travelling festival drifts across Bangkok, Ang Thong, Loei and Chiang Mai, bringing with it a curious mix of performances from France, Japan and Thailand that feel less like entertainment and more like quiet provocations. In Pour Hêtre, two French acrobats abandon dialogue in favour of balance, contortion and a solitary beech tree – a symbol that morphs from object to meaning with every lift and fall. Japan’s Tonbi follows a black kite across a former waste island, brought to life by a family trio from Teshima using music, puppetry and an eight-year-old’s perspective. Add live Thai storytelling, illusion theatre and Sunday August 10, short films at One Bangkok Park, and suddenly, the family outing feels more like a tiny revolution – one where nobody pays for a ticket, but everyone leaves with something.
August 8-23. Free. Check locations and timings on this story right here.

In Another Space feels like a whispered conversation between two minds entwined yet distinct, a dialogue painted across canvases that echo shared dreams and quietly entwined lives. Sadaf and R.M. Naeem trace motifs that ripple through their work – nature, memory and identity – each brushstroke conjuring connection and divergence. Rooted in their Pakistani heritage yet unbound by it, the pair embrace disruption as a kind of freedom. R.M. Naeem’s self-description as ‘international citizens of the world’ isn’t empty rhetoric but a call to rethink belonging beyond borders and history. Their paintings unfold like a ritual – Sadaf’s canvases pulse with foliage caught in rain, while R.M. opens the sky, sunlight piercing through. Together they map a landscape where heritage yields to selfhood and possibility dawns anew.

Until August 31. Free. MATDOT Art Centre, 10am-6pm

Julia Phetra Oborne’s latest series weaves together oil paintings that dwell in the quiet space between women and trees, memory and myth, landscape and identity. Epiphytes takes root in stories whispered through woodlands, where the female form slips through shadows and light, both seen and half-hidden. Drawing from her Thai-British heritage, Oborne treats the forest as a shifting terrain – familiar yet unknowable – a place where personal histories and ancient tales intertwine. The title nods to plants that grow on others, much like the layered canvases themselves, which accumulate marks that both reveal and conceal. Inspired by ritual and the Buddhist legend of the Nariphon – trees bearing fruit shaped like women – these works become more than images. They are living surfaces where past and present meet, unspooling their tangled stories with quiet intensity.

July 26-August 7. Free. Supple Gallery, 11am-6pm

Grief doesn’t arrive with answers. It lingers, shapeless and slow, stretching hours into something unfamiliar. In this quiet, deliberate space, sorrow isn’t a wound to conceal but a landscape to walk through – cautiously, without urgency. Here, pain isn’t romanticised. It’s examined. The artist maps the terrain between collapse and repair, using canvas, steel, wood – materials that refuse to flinch. Human forms are bent, fragmented, almost blurred out. Objects warp. Landscapes ache. Oil paintings sit beside finely carved panels and cold metal surfaces, as if to remind us that emotion, too, can take form. It’s not about healing in the usual sense. More like learning to live beside the weight. To let loss reshape how we see, without demanding we move on. Some beauty asks nothing. It simply stays. Until August 31. Free. MMAD at MunMun Srinakarin Alexgust Gallery, 10.30am-9.30pm

Have you ever looked at yourself mid-week, mid-thought, mid-life, and wondered – when did I become this? Not in the dramatic sense, but in the quiet, slow-burn way things shift. Skin turns over. Hair greys. The favourite mug chips, then becomes more beloved for it. That’s the pulse of WERDIN, an exhibition less about ceramics than it is about metamorphosis. The artist doesn’t seem interested in permanence. Instead, they prod at what happens when things are in flux – how clay can’t always say what needs saying. So they borrow other languages. A gleam of steel here, a crack there. Not mistakes, but evidence. Until August 9. Free. La Lanta Fine Art, 10am-7pm

Language, for Htein Lin, is never just a tool – it’s terrain. In his upcoming solo exhibition at West Eden Gallery, Myanmar’s script becomes both surface and symbol, pressed with memory, shaped by defiance. The show places the artist’s longstanding political practice in quiet, unflinching conversation with national upheaval and personal history. Once a student activist and political prisoner, Htein Lin has spent decades turning lived experience into form – soap maps carved behind bars, skirts stitched with dissent, signage stripped of state control. Here, the Myanmar alphabet is reimagined not as calligraphy but as architecture: each character a vessel for identity, each curve a code of survival.

August 20-October 12. Free. West Eden Gallery, 1am-6pm

Before the roar, there’s a pause – a hush that falls over the jungle, the kind that signals you’re no longer at the top of the food chain. Jurassic World: The Experience drops you into that moment and doesn’t let go. In this latest, most ambitious version yet, Isla Nublar is reimagined across more than 10 sprawling zones. It’s not just a stroll through a film set – it’s an encounter. Life-sized dinosaurs emerge from the trees, scenes unfold with eerie familiarity and the line between fiction and reality blurs with every step. Presented by Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, the experience doesn’t ask for your suspension of disbelief. It demands it. The prehistoric past isn’t behind glass. It’s right there, breathing.

August 8 onwards. B579-989 via here. Asiatique The Riverfront, 11am-10pm

There’s something quietly magical about lantern light – how it flickers and softens, turning the ordinary into something otherworldly. For years, this spectacle has drawn crowds from across the globe, locals included, all eager to lose themselves in giant paper structures resembling creatures born of myth and imagination. Now, for the first time, Bangkok gets its own chapter with ‘Spirit of Mountains and Seas’. Inspired by the ancient Chinese tome Shan Hai Jing, the festival reanimates legends of mysterious beasts and rare flora through lanterns that pulse with colour and sound. It’s not just a display but a full-sensory voyage – where light dances, stories unfold and fantasy feels real enough to touch. July 27-15 August. Free. Iconsiam