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This list was built the slow way. We started at fairs, then followed the breadcrumbs to the people making sure ink and paper still matter.
Call it a zine. Call it a studio, a shop. At its core, this is about recognising rooms full of people with ink on their fingers. The five entries here do not answer to the same name. Some are things you read and look at. Others are the infrastructure that makes it all possible. We in
cluded both because a scene is an ecosystem, not just its output.
What qualified anything for this list was simple: does it matter to Bangkok's independent print world? Is it made with intention? Is someone's creative vision driving it? If the answer to all three was yes, it's here.
Bangkok's zine scene didn't arrive fully formed. It showed up super humbly along Phra Athit Rd – small, a bit rough around the edges, passed between people who'd found each other through punk music and photocopiers and a quiet agreement that the world needed more weird little magazines in it.
Photograph: CTDzine - Thailand
Cherish the Darkness, widely considered the first Thai zine, was already loose in the world. So were the Xerox machines, the long-arm staplers and the ink-stained afternoons that always ran longer than planned.
For a while the internet made things complicated. By 2004 the energy had shifted – not dramatically, just the way things reorganise when something faster and cheaper shows up. The scene didn't disappear so much as take longer naps between growth spurts.
It resurfaced around 2013, when illustrator Lee Anantawat and partner Chris held a zine-making workshop at Speedy Grandma. About 14 people came. Then they kept coming back. What followed was slow and unannounced – more makers, more fairs, more tiny publications made with care, arriving into a world getting tired of screens.
And right now, Bangkok’s print community isn’t exactly gigantic – but it’s good and it’s growing. Risograph studios, food journals, art magazines, underground zines. The Bangkok Art Book Fair at BACC is the single best moment to catch all of this in one room – makers, publishers, studios and readers.
Five made the cut and it wasn't easy – deep appreciation to everyone in it.
1. Wuthipol Designs
Photograph: Wuthipol Designs
Tum Wuthipol has been making zines since 1998 – the first one knocked out in junior high with his childhood neighbour, which is honestly the origin story this whole list deserves. Bangkok-based and properly obsessive about it, he works somewhere between photography and publication design, making handmade photobooks and zines where the images are left to do all the talking – on the quiet conviction that pictures carry more when words aren't hovering nearby telling you what to think.
The back catalogue is the kind you fall into – street photography from Bangkok, Tokyo, Seoul and Melbourne, colour studies, found-object series, curated work featuring artists from across Asia.
He also co-founded printPRINT, Bangkok's independent self-publishing fair.
Everything is handmade, carefully packed and shippable to your door. Stalk the full catalogue at wuthipoldesigns.bigcartel.com and follow the making-of at @wuthipol.designs.
Founded in 2017 by Wimonporn and Wisaruth Wisidh, a couple who met in publishing and never really found a reason to leave, they've spent nearly a decade working with Thai and Asian artists across 100+ titles, from conceptual zines to artist books. The shop is part-bookshop, part-rabbit hole – over 300 titles from around the world alongside their own in-house work, curated tightly enough that nothing feels like filler.
Spacebar Zine moved in 2025 to a proper expanded storefront at GalileOasis, now open daily – which matters more than it sounds for a project that used to run by appointment only. Workshops, bookmaking sessions and zine counselling (genuinely a thing they offer, genuinely worth it) fill out the calendar and they've taken Thai print culture to book fairs in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Melbourne. If you want to understand what's actually happening in Bangkok's print world right now, start here.
Spacebar Zine at GalileOasis Art Space, 535/32 Wat Phraya Yang Alley, Ratchathewi. Open daily 11am-7pm, closed Tuesdays.
If you've spotted something beautifully lo-fi and texturally strange come out of the Bangkok creative scene lately, there's a good chance Haptic's hands were on it.
A Risograph printing and design studio operating out of Sukhumvit 31, they print zines, posters, name cards, art prints and invitations – and you can commission your own. The Riso aesthetic is their whole ethos around tactile, intentional making. The slightly imperfect ink layering, the grainy texture, the way colours bleed into each other just a touch – it produces something no digital workflow can convincingly fake.
They also run workshops and sell a small selection of their own editions. Pricing for custom print runs is quote-based, so come with specifics.
235/10 Sukhumvit 31, Wattana. Open Mon-Fri, 11am-6pm.
Nearly 60 issues in and still going strong – bkk UNZINE is one of the most consistent creative platforms the city has produced. Founded by Sketchman Boris (Boris Aravindabalan, who grew up in India drawing obsessively and never stopped), it started as a free monthly digital art magazine open to submissions and has gradually grown into something much more.
The studio space, UNZINE 95, hosts weekly life drawing sessions, a Comics Club every Sunday, a Monday night drawing meetup and regular mixers – making it as much a gathering place as a publication.
There's now a physical comics anthology, too. UNZINE Comics launched its debut print issue in 2025, featuring short stories from a tight roster of contributors with Boris providing the cover. They also organise the annual BKK Comics Art Festival at BACC, now heading into its fourth year. The online magazine is free; events are ticketed separately, usually at prices that won't hurt!
Their Vol. 2 set the tone with interviews spanning an anonymous graffiti writer, art professors and independent shop owners.
Vol. 3 keeps that same energy going. The latest is a double-sided zine wandering through beliefs, subcultures, horoscopes and fun bits of the art community, with cool and inspiring artists in the mix throughout.
Carefree and curious, genuinely uninterested in polish for its own sake, it sits in a completely different corner of the scene from the more design-forward titles on this list. Which is precisely why it deserves a spot. There's room for grit in any healthy creative scene and TYE brings it.
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