Art exhibitions this July

Somewhere between a botanical archive and a love letter to overlooked symbols, this exhibition asks: what if flowers weren’t just decorative but deeply political? Chiang Mai’s flame of the forest, Khon Kaen’s golden shower, Ratchaburi’s pink cassia and Pattani’s hibiscus are plucked from provincial emblems and thrust into the present, reframed through sculpture, installation and graphic forms. Each bloom becomes a portal – to place, memory, even protest – hinting at what it means to belong to a region, and how nature codes itself into the fabric of everyday life. Across four immersive zones, the show leans into nostalgia and community, challenging the way we see flora in urban contexts. This is not your auntie's flower show. It’s a quiet reconsideration of identity, told petal by petal. Until 6 Jul. Free. TCDC, 10.30am-7pm 

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

Somewhere between sculpture and sentimentality sits the art toy – a strange, gleaming relic of childhood reimagined through adult obsession. In this curated gathering of 40 artists from Thailand and beyond, the toy becomes a vessel. Not mass-produced plastic nostalgia, but something rarer, stranger. Each piece is born in small numbers, a handful in existence, as though deliberately resisting the clutter of the everyday. What’s on display isn’t just charm or quirk, but thought. These figures hold stories, philosophies, private fixations cast in resin or vinyl. They aren’t just collected, they’re deciphered – studied like artefacts, whispered over at conventions, placed delicately behind glass. Here, the artist is part mythmaker, part sculptor. Until July 31. Free. Central: The Original Store, 10am-6pm

Rebirth rarely arrives with fanfare. More often, it smoulders quietly – like ash cooling after fire, or something green pushing up through scorched soil. At TAY Songwat, spread across the second and third floors, an interactive 4D exhibition leans into this quiet insistence on beginning again. Rooted in the aftermath of destruction, the work draws from wildfires – unruly, raw – and the complex part humans play in both their ignition and their healing. But this isn’t a lecture in disguise. It’s intimate, unsettling, occasionally tender. Two major installations invite the body in, while video guides offer something closer to a conversation than instruction. Hope is there, just not in pastel. It’s in the invitation to reflect, to return to something elemental, and maybe – just maybe – to begin again, even if it’s only with a thought. Until July 20. Free. TAY Songwat, 9.30am-5.30pm

We like to think we’re in charge. That materials yield, that objects sit still until we say otherwise. But in this quietly unsettling series, plastic plays the lead. Heat-pressed and layered without brush or pigment, the works imitate landscape – clouds, coastlines, meadows – but it’s the plastic itself doing the talking. Its texture, tint and surface are left intact, unpredictable. The artist doesn’t command so much as collaborate, allowing the material to behave on its own terms. There’s something eerie about it. Familiar forms lure you in – pretty, even pastoral – until you notice the imprint of packaging, the echo of something disposable that refuses to vanish. The illusion fractures. Plastic, once obedient, now lingers, insists, performs. And we, the audience, are left to reckon with a world where the artificial no longer takes instruction. It simply stays. Until August 2. Free. Warin Lab Contemporary, 10.30-7.30pm

Tomoaki Murayama doesn’t draw animals, he conjures them. In his first solo exhibition in Thailand, the Japanese artist offers a quiet kind of magic – dense, monochrome worlds where owls share space with octopuses, where roots tangle with antlers, and where the line between things blurs into something softer. Born in Kyoto, Murayama takes the forest not just as subject but as philosophy: an ecosystem without borders, where everything touches everything else, eventually. His drawings – intricate to the point of near obsession – reward slowness. What first appears decorative reveals layers, like moss on bark or veins in a leaf. The sculptures feel like those same lines, suddenly upright and breathing. Even the gallery space resists separation. Creatures perch near eye level, tucked into corners, watching. It’s not just an exhibition. It’s a quiet argument against division. Until July 18. Free. Art Focus Bangkok, Rivercity Bangkok, 10am-8pm

There are artists who write, and then there’s Tang Chang – Bangkok-born, Sino-Thai, who dissolved the boundary altogether. For Chang, language wasn’t a tool so much as a presence, flickering somewhere between gesture and breath. At Calligraphic Abstraction, now at Bangkok Kunsthalle, his paintings refuse to be pinned down. Made between 1971 and 1972 – two blisteringly productive years – the works occupy a space where script becomes spirit, and symbols resist being named. Characters hover on the brink of recognition, echoing Chinese forms but never settling into clarity. Others mimic the cadence of poetry, stripped of words but still pulsing with rhythm. There’s a sort of devotion in it – though not to meaning. The line itself becomes the prayer, trembling between what can be read and what can only be felt. Until July 13. Free. Bangkok Kunsthalle, 6pm-8pm

50 years on, the James H. W. Thompson Foundation isn’t celebrating so much as excavating. In a region where war never fully ends – just recedes, reshapes – this exhibition gathers 13 international artist collectives to unpick the Cold War’s quieter aftermath. Spread across four venues – the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, William Warren Library, Jim Thompson House Museum and Jim Thompson Art Centre. Not the chest-thumping headlines, but what lingered: the unease, the absences, the memories that don’t quite sit still. Here, history isn’t recited but felt. Each work unearths personal, often peripheral stories that slip through the cracks of official accounts. The result is a constellation of perspectives – messy, emotional, unresolved. Across painting, video and installation, the pieces gesture towards grief, survival and the strange elasticity of memory. A reminder that what we inherit isn’t just fact, but feeling. And sometimes, fiction is closer to the truth. Until July 6. Free. Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, William Warren Library, Jim Thompson House Museum and Jim Thompson Art Centre.

This festival doesn’t try to define queer cinema. It simply lets it speak. Curated by Baturu, a collective that believes art doesn’t need permission to be political, the programme spans fifteen films from across continents – Nepal to New Zealand, France to the Philippines. The stories aren’t stitched together by genre or tone, but by their refusal to shrink. They don’t beg for tolerance. They breathe, ache, kiss, leave. Screenings unfold across Bangkok – from the Goethe-Institut to Buffalo Bridge Gallery – while Chiang Mai sees parallel gatherings hosted by Sapphic Riot and Some Space. Expect talks, workshops, unlikely connections. Expect joy that doesn’t need to explain itself. Jun 27-Jul 6. Check the schedule here. Free. Goethe-Institut Thailand

This isn’t interested in shiny newness. It’s more about resonance. About pieces that carry memory, not just style. From June 27-July 3, this pop-up market in Bangkok becomes less showroom, more living archive. MINICANA, making its city debut, teams up with Chanintr’s expertly chosen pre-owned collections to host a week of curated disorder: spatial experiments, quiet revelations, and the soft chaos of creative exchange. It all kicks off with an almost-party on Industry Night – NotAFashionShow unfolds alongside Charmkok’s strange and beautiful bites, with workshops drifting somewhere nearby. RomRom Takeover follows, all rhythm and disorder, then Slow Shop Sunday dials the volume back down. Between June 30 and July 2, the space becomes a quiet showroom again until July 3, when everything is priced to leave and nothing stays put. Jun 27-Jul 3. B999 (industry night) and B555 (RomRom takeover) via here. Chanintr Pop-Up Market, 7pm onwards

It’s a quiet panic that comes with growing older – not just the creaky knees or the birthday candles multiplying like bacteria, but the silence around it. Coming of Aging, an experiential exhibition by Eyedropper Fill, doesn’t try to soothe that discomfort. Instead, it invites you to sit with it. Think less anti-ageing cream, more existential unpacking. Through three immersive zones, visitors are nudged to consider ageing not as a decline, but as a shift – inevitable, complex and deeply human. In a world obsessed with FOMO (the fear of missing out), a subtler fear creeps in: FOGO, the fear of getting old, now bubbling up in Gen Z timelines and TikTok laments. This exhibition doesn’t offer neat resolutions. But it does ask the question we tend to avoid: what if ageing isn’t the enemy, but just another way of becoming? Until Jul 16. Free. River City Bangkok, 10am-8pm

Between 1991 and 1996, Tawatchai Somkong was quietly crafting a visual language all his own. His 16 chosen art books, culled from a wider archive of 23, capture a world of symbolic abstraction born during his studies at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, India. The exhibition unfolds like a whispered dialogue between faiths, where religious icons collide and merge in unexpected ways. Over 2,000 images map a journey of beauty and belief, revealing the artist’s deep spiritual reckoning. It’s less a straightforward show and more an immersive meditation on identity, faith and the power of symbols to shape our inner landscapes – a haunting visual hymn to complexity and devotion. Until Jul 13. Free. Blacklist Gallery, 10am-4pm

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. Icon Siam 

At first glance, she’s just a little girl – barefoot, wide-eyed, often mid-thought – but look closer and ‘Little’, the character at the centre of Peachful’s debut solo exhibition, is more than a sketch. She’s a vessel for what gets buried beneath grown-up logic: yearning, softness, the ache to be chosen. Known for her light-as-air linework, Peachful doesn’t just draw feelings – she maps them, tracing the contours of longing and nostalgia with the quiet precision of someone who’s felt it all before. This isn’t an escape into fantasy so much as a reckoning with it. Through the fairytale lens of childhood dreams, the exhibition asks: what if the princess we wanted to become was never the goal, but the question? And what if the answer has been quietly waiting, just beneath the surface, all along? Jul 3-Aug 3. Free. RCB Galleria 4, River City Bangkok, 10am-8pm

Print is back – bold, messy and everywhere. This year’s festival lands in Bangkok with the quietly subversive theme: ‘Printing is everywhere’. Think less gallery, more street corner. Organised by GroundControl and PPP Studio, the event swaps exclusivity for ink-stained hands and shared space. Expect everything from striking wall pieces to tiny treasures, plus a special showcase pairing ten artists with ten print studios – each bringing their own twist. After Chiang Mai’s turn in 2022, Bangkok now gets to press, pull and smudge its way in. There’ll be weekend workshops too, perfect for anyone keen to roll up sleeves and give it a go. July 4-15. Free. Central Chidlom, 4pm-10pm

It starts with a flicker on the screen. A whisper in the dark. The kind of silence that doesn’t stay still. Thailand’s first horror film festival isn’t content with jump scares – it wants to crawl under your skin and stay there. Held somewhere between a nightmare and a block party, the festival reimagines outdoor cinema with a line-up of scream-worthy titles: Ouija, Us, Smile, The Sisters, Coming Soon and Shutter. But it doesn’t stop at the credits. There’s a haunted house turned art exhibition, unsettling stories from behind the scenes, short film competitions and eerie conversations with directors and cast. Add in live music, food that bites back, and a programme that keeps shifting and it’s not just horror – it’s a haunted playground. Updates via Facebook: Thai Film Director Association. July 4-6. Free. Maen Sri Waterworks building.

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

The potholes weren’t metaphorical, though they might as well have been. In Tada Hengsapkul’s latest work, a simple journey home becomes a quiet reckoning – with governance, with memory, with the steady erosion of what should have been maintained. The rutted streets of Bangkok aren’t just inconvenient. They’re symptomatic. Each jolt and swerve calls back the artist’s past trips along Mittraphap Road, the so-called ‘Friendship Highway’, once a Cold War-era gift from America, now a conduit for uneven development stretching from capital to countryside. Here, infrastructure acts as both a relic and reminder – of broken systems and promises that never quite held. What begins as a personal moment unfolds into something far wider, asking not what progress looks like, but whom it truly serves. Not everything built was meant to last. May 17-Jul 13. Free. Hop Photo Gallery, MunMun Srinakarin, 11am-7pm

In his latest offering, Udom Taephanich – long known for saying too much with a single raised eyebrow – turns his attention to the strange erosion of play. Not the type sold in boxes, but the kind we used to conjure instinctively, when sofa cushions became castles and questions came without hesitation. Back then, imagination was a birthright. We made monsters out of scribbles, entire worlds from cardboard. Then came the invisible border called adulthood, where mistakes became shameful and joy needed justification. A reminder that the real decay isn’t physical – it’s forgetting how to be ridiculous without apology. And maybe, just maybe, it’s reversible. Jun 7-Aug 3. B250-850 via here. The Pinnacle Hall, ICONSIAM, 11am-9pm

This exhibition wants you to look – and keep looking. This is portraiture unraveled, pulled from its classical moorings and reassembled in ways that feel both intimate and estranged. There’s weight and symmetry in works by André Schulze and Lino Lago – nods to tradition, to balance, to the stillness of oil and time. But that’s only one side of the mirror. Celio Koko splinters the form, pulling it towards something more elastic. Adriana Oliver and Chance Cooper remove the face altogether, offering blankness as a kind of truth, or at least a provocation. What does it mean to be seen now? Between digital noise and emotional residue, the exhibition sketches an answer. Or maybe just a question, blurred at the edges, like memory itself. May 30-Jul 30. Free. Agni Gallery, 10am-7pm

To mark the 20th anniversary of Naruto, 54 Entertainment, in partnership with SL Experiences, presents Naruto The Gallery – an immersive exhibition that invites fans to explore the intertwined fates of Naruto and Sasuke. With seven meticulously curated zones, visitors journey through key moments, from their childhood in Konoha to their fated reunion during the Fourth Great Ninja War. The exhibition is not just a walk down memory lane, though. It showcases original storyboards, character designs and unforgettable anime scenes that reveal the heart of the series. Highlights include a stunning diorama of Hidden Leaf Village, a tribute to iconic quotes and an exclusive collaboration with five emerging Japanese artists. It’s a celebration of the anime’s legacy, full of surprises for fans both old and new. May 31-Jul 31. B250-450 via here. Free for kids below four years old. River City Bangkok, 10am-8pm

This immersive, interactive digital art exhibition themed "Nature and Wildlife" highlights the beauty of ecosystems and biodiversity through advanced techniques like projection mapping, laser art and high-quality media. Spread across nine rooms at King Power Mahanakon, each space presents a distinctive experience reminiscent of a fantastical zoo. Notable features include the Kaleidoscope zone, enveloped in a variety of flowers that serve as food for butterflies; a laser projection room showcasing the majesty of predators; and an interactive underwater world. Youngsters can also enjoy a colouring activity and have their creations appear on the walls. A special surprise awaits with the appearance of Moo Deng, the famous pygmy hippopotamus from Khao Kheow Zoo, who awaits in different rooms to delight you. Until Jul 31. B350 via here and B1,000-1,200 including the Sky Walk via here. Fourth floor, King Power Mahanakon, 10am-9pm