Art exhibitions this October

For the first time, the Prix Pictet has arrived in Thailand, bringing with it 12 photographers whose work has been shortlisted for the award’s tenth cycle. The theme, ‘Human’, is both vast and uncomfortably precise. Each artist approaches it from a different angle, tracing the mess and wonder of being alive – whether through documentary, portrait, or images that test the very limits of light. The subjects are unflinching: the violence of borders, the fragility of childhood, the slow collapse of economies, the endurance of Indigenous communities, the marks left behind by industry. Collectively, they ask who we are and what we have done to the planet entrusted to us. Founded seventeen years ago, the Prix Pictet has never felt more urgent.

Until November 23. Free. Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 10am-8pm

Still Blossom, the latest exhibition from one of Thailand’s leading abstract painters, feels like an antidote to the noise outside. The canvases are filled with flowers, not as decorative objects but as reminders of what it means to be alive and attentive. Shapes blur, colours clash then soften, and somewhere in the space between intensity and delicacy you find yourself pausing longer than expected. Each piece suggests that presence itself is enough – nothing needs to transform, nothing has to strive. The flowers remain flowers, and in their refusal to be anything else they mirror us at our most human. The show isn’t about spectacle so much as sensation, asking viewers to lean in and feel with the heart rather than simply look with the eyes.

Until October 12. Free. Number 1 Gallery, River City Bangkok, 10am-7pm

This exhibition is a mirror held up to a country suspended in uncertainty. In Thailand, instability has stopped feeling like an interruption and begun to resemble a permanent state – politics without direction, policies that drift, and a population caught between fatigue and quiet despair. Anxiety Storage and Artsaveworld respond to this condition with work that wears irony as armour. At first glance their pieces seem playful, even comic, but beneath the surface is an unmistakable weight: frustration, grief, the stubborn refusal to collapse. What makes the show distinctly Thai is its humour, born out of contradiction and absurdity, a coping mechanism that lets people laugh in order to keep standing. In the cracks of satire, fragments of hope remain.

Until November 16. Free. MunMun Art Destination, 10.30am-7pm

Constellation of Complicity gathers work from Myanmar, Iran, Russia, Syria and communities long marked by displacement or autonomy struggles, places often reduced to headlines about conflict. What emerges instead is a map of connections, where power flows less as isolated regimes than as a network of cooperation – diplomacy stitched to military force, economies buttressed by shared violence, sovereignty used as camouflage. The exhibition doesn’t rehearse trauma so much as trace how oppression migrates, mutates and reappears across borders, and how resistance too moves in unexpected echoes. Its title signals a double act: exposing complicity while gesturing toward solidarity. Aesthetics here function as tools – ritual, forensic, speculative – reminding us that art can be evidence, a method of seeing patterns the news rarely lingers on.

Until October 19. Free. Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 10am-8pm

Imagine Sukhumvit unfolds across the gleaming maze of the Em District, where more than eighty artists scatter their visions through Emporium, Emquartier and the newly opened Emsphere. The premise is deceptively simple: to tell the story of one of Bangkok’s most restless neighbourhoods through art. Yet what makes it compelling is how differently each artist interprets the same terrain. For some it’s a portrait of urban speed, for others a study of what gets lost when glass towers rise. The line-up is deliberately eclectic, pairing big names with newcomers whose work feels raw, unpredictable and urgent. Taken together, the exhibition is less about a single narrative than about a neighbourhood in flux, a stage where established voices and the next wave share equal space.

Until October 15. Free. EM District, 10am-10pm

Chaiyot Jindakul’s latest series was born during a turning point in his life: becoming a father. Each canvas is threaded with the quiet astonishment of watching his first son grow, the weight of new responsibility balanced with the wonder of innocence unfolding before him. Love here doesn’t appear as sentimentality but as something sharper, etched into colour and form. For Chaiyot, art is never detached from living – it begins with action, discipline and a stubborn fidelity to searching. Every work becomes a record of perseverance, a refusal to accept easy conclusions, a reminder that beauty alone cannot measure value. What emerges instead is an intimate cartography of fatherhood, labour and faith in process, where each painting feels like both witness and offering.

Until October 26. Free. Joyman Gallery, 11am-6pm

Bangkok once held a place in cinema that slipped quietly from memory. The International Film Festival, which for years drew attention alongside Osaka and Busan, disappeared after 2008, leaving only whispers of screenings and red carpets in the city’s imagination. Now it returns, 16 years later, not with nostalgia but with ambition. Curated by the Thailand Creative Culture Agency in collaboration with the Department of Cultural Promotion and local cinemas, the festival opens on September 29 with Tee Yod 3 (Death Whisperer 3), a Thai production that anchors the program. Over 200 films from around the globe will fill screens across the city, offering a pulse of contemporary storytelling. For Bangkok, it is both a revival and a reminder that the world’s cinema can still converge in unexpected, exhilarating ways.

September 27-October 15. Cinemas across Bangkok.

If you’ve ever tumbled into a Junji Ito spiral at 2am, you’ll know his horror isn’t about sudden shocks. It’s the kind that worms under your skin and refuses to leave, lingering long after the page is closed. Think cursed beauties that regenerate no matter how many times they’re destroyed, balloon-headed predators dangling from nooses, and entire towns spiralling into obsession. The Junji Ito Collection Horror House brings those worlds to Bangkok, a walk-through that turns manga dread into something physical, sprawling over 1,500 square metres. Tomie’s ruinous charm and Souichi’s nail-chewing mischief are ready to greet visitors. The real kicker? Ito himself lands on October 11 at SF Cinema, MBK, a chance to meet the mind behind the nightmares and feel, just a little, like fiction is bleeding into life.

October 10-January 5. B300-1,000 via here. MBK Centre, 11am-8pm

This isn’t just an exhibition, it’s a collision of worlds on paper. Picture illustrators from across generations and borders swapping sketches, trading stories and trying to map out futures that don’t always follow straight lines. The physical fair buzzes with shortlisted artists showing and selling their work, but even those who don’t make the floor find space online at BangkokIllustrationFair.com, a kind of digital sketchbook open to all. Over 50 reviewers – curators, publishers, agencies – move through the fair like treasure hunters, each expected to pick at least one artist for future collaboration. Rewards here aren’t trophies but chances, opportunities that might stretch well beyond Bangkok. The whole thing is stitched together by a community determined to prove illustration isn’t niche, it’s necessary.

October 23-26. Free. Central World, 11am-8pm

Ploenchan ‘Mook’ Vinyaratn has turned Bangkok Kunsthalle into a space where weaving isn’t just craft, it’s conversation. Her most ambitious institutional installation to date reimagines fragments of past textile works, letting textures, colours and forms collide in ways that feel both deliberate and accidental. The building itself – once the Thai Wattana Panich printing house – anchors the work, with 399 circular fabric pieces echoing its original logo, each stamped with words from children’s books once produced on-site. Collaborating with other Thai women, Vinyaratn deconstructs looms and rebuilds them into monumental forms, creating works that pulse with collective memory, resilience and quiet audacity. By the time you leave, the fragments have stitched themselves into a living narrative, a reminder that history, imagination and community can fold seamlessly into one.

September 26-November 30. Free. Bangkok Kunsthalle, 2pm-8pm

Jiajia Qi arrives in Bangkok with her first solo exhibition in Thailand, but this isn’t a simple retrospective or a neat display of greatest hits. Supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Thailand, the show stretches across her past works and new experiments, each piece circling back to her obsession with place and the slippery ways it shapes us. The framework leans into Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of ‘nomadic thought’ where history isn’t pinned down and geography refuses to play by institutional rules. It’s less about tidy narratives and more about movement, flux and the sensation of being caught in between. Expect to leave with the feeling you’ve wandered somewhere unfamiliar, yet strangely close.

September 25-November 8. Free. SAC Gallery, 10am-6pm

Tintin Cooper has a way of holding up a mirror that doesn’t flatter but fascinates. Her latest exhibition peers at Thailand and Southeast Asia through the eyes of outsiders, before flipping the lens back onto locals negotiating endless waves of tourism, migration and the cliches both sides quietly cling to. Here, the works are stitched together from the messy fabric of online life: animal memes, TikTok clips of holidaymakers misbehaving, ‘passport bro’ forums and Thai news headlines. Cooper treats this digital chaos as autobiography, shaped by a childhood spent adapting to languages and gestures that were never quite her own. Even the titles read like cultural fragments. One canvas lifts from Matichon’s bleak June headline I’m Ok, Not Ok, while another lovingly immortalises Moo Deng, Thailand’s internet-famous pygmy hippo, as if memes were scripture.

Until November 8. Free. SAC Gallery, 11am-6pm

Leather has always been more than surface – it carries memory, texture, even contradiction. Unveiling Leather: The Language of Modularity gathers seven artists to test just how far that thought can stretch. Here, leather isn’t draped neatly over chairs but stitched, folded, bent and layered until it becomes structure, not skin. Some works recall architectural precision, sharp and geometric, while others surrender to the material’s natural instincts, twisting and flexing into forms that feel almost alive. The exhibition lingers on modularity, on how shapes adapt as easily as lives do, shifting to meet new spaces and new demands. There’s tradition woven through each piece – craftsmanship and heritage intact – but the focus tilts firmly toward the present, where innovation and imagination tug leather into uncharted terrain.

September 20-December 7. Free. Four Seasons ART Space by MOCA Bangkok, 10.30am-7.30pm

Colour isn’t just decoration, it’s shorthand for everything we can’t quite say out loud. A blush of pink, the thud of red, the quiet ache of blue – it’s a vocabulary that sidesteps grammar and dives straight into the gut. This exhibition, born from a collaboration between a Thai space and Seoul’s L Gallery, leans into that idea with six Korean artists who treat colour like a confession booth. 2Myoung twists play into sculpture, Im Solji sketches storybook daydreams, Kim Ok-Jin finds solitude in the city’s shadows, Lee Jaeyual paints landscapes that slip between folklore and neon. Suzy Q sends her alter-ego Moo wandering through questions of selfhood, while Qwaya steadies the room with soft green and blue oils. Together, they remind us colour is never passive – it’s always speaking.

September 5-October 12. Free. Maison JE Bangkok, 11am-7pm

Imagine stepping into a gallery where the walls don’t just hold pictures, they talk back. That’s the energy of this experimental project, where five illustrators – Coma, Mariko Toey, Rerunn, Tableteee and Winmahun – have built their own miniature worlds inside something called a Showcube. The trick? Appropriation. Not the dry academic kind, but a gleeful borrowing of art history’s most familiar faces and shapes, reworked until they look entirely new. One cube might feel playful, another unsettling, a third strangely intimate. Together they make a maze that’s less about staring politely and more about getting lost inside someone else’s imagination. And because no exhibition feels complete without your fingerprints on it, there’s a final challenge: stamp out your own identity, and see who you might become.

Until October 19. Free. Mun Mun Art Destination, 10.30am-7pm

Imagine walking into a room flooded with red, green and blue – pure light, stripped to its essentials, yet somehow unfamiliar. That’s the entry point for this exhibition, which brings together 1,000 photographs chosen from an open call, each one a tiny spark in a bigger conversation. Here, though, it’s treated like raw material for storytelling. The result feels less like a gallery and more like stepping into a prism, where photographs don’t hang politely but spill out in waves of colour. It’s part archive, part experiment, and entirely immersive – a reminder that photography is still finding new ways to reinvent how we look.

Until October 19. Free. Mun Mun Art Destination, 10.30am-7pm

27 years is a long time in Bangkok years. Long enough to watch clubs rise and collapse, galleries open then vanish, governments reshuffle on repeat. Yet the Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music keeps turning up, unbothered by the noise, with another season that feels more like a marathon than a sprint. 14 productions unfold over six weeks, running the spectrum from Cuban contemporary to Russian opera, stitched together with the kind of programming that makes sense only when you’re in the middle of it. Headliners include China’s National Acrobatic Troupe, nicknamed the country’s ‘dream team’, a company that’s been racking up gold medals since the 1950s. They’ll land in September, twisting physics at the Thailand Cultural Centre, and probably making you rethink the limits of a human spine.

Until October 15. Starts at B3,000 via here. Thailand Cultural Centre. 

75 years after Charles Schulz first drew a small dog with improbable dreams, Snoopy is still everywhere – dancing on T-shirts, perched on mugs, drifting across the cultural imagination with the ease of someone who never grew up. This anniversary exhibition, arriving in Bangkok for the first time, asks what it means for a cartoon beagle to outlast presidents, wars and changing fashions. More than 100 works are on display, gathered across four zones that slip between art, couture, pop culture and nostalgia. Contributions from Thai and international artists sit beside collaborations with major fashion houses, while archival strips remind us that friendship and humour are never dated. 

September 6-December 7. B350-890 via here. RCB Galleria 1-2, River City Bangkok, 10am-8pm

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

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

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

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