Our picks for the best things to do in Bangkok this weekend

Song Wat turns playful without losing its sense of history. For Bangkok Design Week, the district becomes a walkable board game, stretching across streets that once carried trade, gossip and daily deals. Building on the earlier manhole cover project, this new chapter invites visitors to play merchant, navigating landmarks and stories that shaped the neighbourhood’s working life. Set along Song Wat Road at Tuk Khaek, Merchants of Song Wat reimagines the area as a network of warehouses and shops. Players move as caravans, trading goods, striking bargains with local businesses and slowly building their own corner of commerce. The rules stay friendly, the visuals clear, drawing from familiar colours and signs around the area.    Until February. Free. Song Wat, 2pm-8pm on weekdays and 1pm-7pm on weekends.

Hands still matter, even now. At Rosewood Bangkok, Made in Thai-Hands arrives through a collaboration with Play Art House, offering a thoughtful look at living craft traditions shaped by patience rather than speed. Curated by independent artist Seada Samdao, the exhibition brings together 10 Thai artists working between inherited techniques and contemporary thinking, without treating either as fixed. Moving through the space feels like travelling across different landscapes, guided by texture, material and touch. Threads hold hours of quiet labour, pigment settles through instinct and surfaces reveal years of repetition. Nothing rushes for attention. Instead, each work carries the weight of human effort and the calm confidence that comes from knowing a process deeply. While the rhythms of making remain central, the voices feel current, led by a generation carrying tradition forward with clarity rather than reverence. Craft here feels alive, personal and quietly defiant.   Until March 20. Free. G/F, Rosewood Bangkok, 9am-9pm

Song Wat turns playful without losing its sense of history. For Bangkok Design Week, the district becomes a walkable board game, stretching across streets that once carried trade, gossip and daily deals. Building on the earlier manhole cover project, this new chapter invites visitors to play merchant, navigating landmarks and stories that shaped the neighbourhood’s working life. Set along Song Wat Road at Tuk Khaek, Merchants of Song Wat reimagines the area as a network of warehouses and shops. Players move as caravans, trading goods, striking bargains with local businesses and slowly building their own corner of commerce. The rules stay friendly, the visuals clear, drawing from familiar colours and signs around the area.    January 29-February. Free. Song Wat, 2pm-8pm on weekdays and 1pm-7pm on weekends.

Bangkok welcomes 2026 with a knowing wink as Muse Anime Festival sets up at JAM SPACE, a familiar meeting point for pop culture devotees. This is less trade fair, more shared obsession. Fourteen anime titles spread across 17 photo zones turn fandom into a walk-through experience, complete with oversized sets and scenes designed for lingering rather than rushing. Expect towering inflatables of Momo and Okarun from DAN DA DAN plus Rimuru, the eternally cheerful slime, looming large for cameras. Beyond the visuals, shelves fill with officially licensed pieces and harder-to-find imports, tempting even the disciplined collector. Food gets its own moment too, thanks to a themed cafe riffing on SPY x FAMILY and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.    January 10-March 29. Free. 4/F, MBK Centre, 11am-9pm

The next most important thing after love Maho Takahashi’s solo exhibition speaks softly, trusting that memory does the heavy lifting. Her works return to a gentler world, one that feels familiar even if it cannot be placed exactly. Childhood appears not as nostalgia but as texture: fleeting moods, half-remembered comforts and the quiet confusion of growing older without noticing it happen. Rather than spelling anything out, Takahashi leaves space. Images hover, emotions shift slightly and meaning waits for the viewer to bring their own history to the surface. It feels personal without becoming precious, reflective without leaning sentimental. This is an exhibition that understands growing up as an ongoing process rather than a finished state. Children moving towards adulthood sit alongside adults still figuring things out, often using the same tools. What lingers most is a sense of permission to feel gently, to remember unevenly and to accept that some memories work better when left a little unresolved.   Until March 8. Free. CURU Gallery, midday-5pm

Hope has a strange way of finding you when you least expect it, usually while you’re still adjusting your fringe in a mirrored wall. This exhibition leans into that feeling, pairing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with digital worlds that nudge you towards a lighter mood. The guide is Blossom Bloo, a soft-glowing creature with its loyal Seed, both drifting through scenes that chart the rhythms of a life lived in four chapters. The route begins at The Flower Shop, where you design a tiny seed that reappears later as part of a vast installation. Summer stretches out in a field of towering blooms, autumn follows with a golden oak shedding leaves that respond to your steps, then winter quietens everything with pale light and drifting snow. Spring closes the journey with a sweep of colour that feels a bit like exhaling after holding your breath too long.   Until March 10 2026. B450-990 via here. 6/F, Iconsiam, 10.30am-9pm

ONE OK ROCK has been smashing it in Thailand for a decade now. The Japanese rock quartet first hit Central World Live back in 2013, then Thunder Dome in 2016 and Impact Arena in 2018. Their most recent gig on December 12 2023 sold out completely, with thousands of fans calling it one of the best shows they'd ever seen. Now the band returns with their latest album DETOX performed live in full. Critics reckon it's their deepest and most globally ambitious record yet. Lead single Tropical Therapy has won serious praise from fans and music press alike for its raw emotion, powerful sound and genre bending approach. If their track record is anything to go by, this show is going to be massive. February 21. B2,700-5,500 via here. Impact Arena, 7pm

A Kid from Yesterday returns with a fifth solo outing that feels quietly defiant. Somphon ‘Paolo’ Ratanavaree’s latest body of work steps back from certainty and sits without knowing, a rare move in a culture obsessed with definitions. Titled “Just” BEING BE/NG BE—NG, the exhibition borrows from Camus’ Philosophy of Sisyphus while nodding to the calm discipline of a Zen garden. The result isn’t comfort or escape, but acceptance of contradiction. Cigarettes sit opposite raked sand, everyday habits facing ritual stillness, neither winning the argument. This space doesn’t promise healing or answers. It allows doubt to exist without apology. Being human here means pausing, noticing and carrying on regardless. In a world eager for declarations, the show suggests something softer and braver: existing without explanation might already be enough.   January 17-March 1. Free. Street Star Gallery, 8am-6pm

Memory often settles in the body before it reaches language. A brush of skin, the pressure of a hand, the sting that lingers just long enough to stay. This project leans on that idea, inviting Badego.bodega to curate an intimate gathering of seven tattoo artists: De hour, Deanxittt, Ice House Studio, Lau Garan Studio, matattyesyes, Sakiw Tattoo and Troll The Tatt. Together, their works read like a shared archive of touch, where personal histories sit quietly beneath ink. Each mark holds a moment that resisted words, shaped instead through line, colour and trust. The exchange between artist and wearer matters as much as the finished image, a private conversation made visible. What emerges feels tender rather than dramatic, reminding us that presence is often felt through skin, not screens, and remembered long after the feeling fades.   January 29-March 19. Free. MunMun Srinakarin, 10.30am-9.30pm

At this exhibition, the first section turns its attention to Korea’s Demilitarised Zone, a strip of land that has carried the weight of an unfinished war since the armistice paused the conflict in 1953. Spread across 248km, with two narrow bands flanking the Military Demarcation Line, it has remained largely untouched for about 70 years. The exhibition doesn’t retell history as much as reframe it, pairing archival echoes with scenes shaped by nature’s quiet resilience. With people kept out, the land has healed in its own stubborn way, giving rise to wetlands, wildflowers and animals that rarely appear elsewhere. What you get is a portrait of a place suspended between past and renewal, still holding its breath yet defiantly alive.   Until February 22 2026. Free. 7/F, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 10am-8pm