Art exhibitions in Chiang Mai this September

Fire Spirits is the second solo exhibition from Chiang Mai-based sculptor Worasit Kileksi, whose practice draws on Buddhist and folk imagery to assemble figures from discarded and rather humble materials – wood, clay, metal and found objects – into primitive gods and mystical animals. In this new body of work the underlying humour of his earlier pieces remains but the atmosphere has shifted toward something more austere. Burnt wood, rusted metal and copper wire form effigies that feel as though they have emerged from a ravaged landscape, neither human nor machine. Alongside them, small terracotta portraits blackened by smoke evoke elderly men and women from northern Thai rural communities, their naïve and expressive faces sharing an uncanny family resemblance. Fire runs quietly through all of it as a thread connecting passage, impermanence and the slow recession of customs and memories with the generations that carried them. Curated by Myrtille Tibayrenc of Toot Yung Art Studio.

Now-October 4. Alliance Française Chiang Mai. Charoen Prathet Road.

Vivera Mori takes its title from a stylisation of the Latin vivere est mori – to live is to die – and makes good on that premise across a body of work built from rusted metal disks, floor-standing sculptures and twelve new mixed media works on paper. The fourth in a series of related solo exhibitions by British artist Dr. Ian Bonde during his time as international guest lecturer at Chiang Mai University, the show is a reconfiguration of installation work first shown at Burapha University in 2025, extended here with new pieces completed during his CMU residency. The new 2D works pair funerary vessel forms with crystal imagery, developed through photomontage, vector graphics and UV inkjet printing before being overdrawn with carbon and white charcoal pencil on Fabriano paper. Crystals for their frozen, structured completeness; urns for their near-universal human role as containers of what remains. The floor works form a stand of tall elements behind the circular rusted wall disks, arranged in opposition.

September 1-15. CMU Faculty of Fine Art Gallery. 239 Huay Kaew Road, Suthep. Opening reception September 1, 5pm. Monday-Friday, 9am-4pm

Thirty-eight oil paintings on wood panel and canvas, most no larger than a sheet of paper: that constraint is the point. LOYI: Portraits is the first Thailand solo exhibition by Chinese painter LOYI, who settled in Chiang Mai in 2025 after moving through Shangri-La, Dali and Kunming. The works take in self-portraits, friends she has made since arriving in the city and, increasingly, animals and plants – each treated with the same attention and duration as a human sitter, and the same refusal to generalise. At this scale a face is not monumentalised. It is held at conversational distance. Curated by Chumpol Taksapornchai, the show sits quietly against the velocity of a city constantly consuming its own image. 

September 5-23. Haan Studio. Charoen Muang Road, Sanpakoi. Opening reception September 5, 2pm-5pm. 10am-4.30pm

Nuestras Historias! Escribamos un Capitulo Nuevo is the first Chiang Mai solo exhibition by Mexican artist and printmaker Juana Estrada Hernández, who teaches printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her prints draw on her family's intergenerational migration stories, working through cultural traditions, food, language and lived experience to examine immigration, assimilation, resistance and the contradictions of the American Dream. Work held in institutional collections across North America and covered by publications including Hyperallergic now lands at Hello, Print Friend Studios, the printmaking space inside Light Bulb – a fitting home for a printmaker whose practice is focused on community and cultural transmission.

Now-September 9. Hello, Print Friend Studios at Light Bulb, Hussadhisawee Road, Chang Phuak. Monday-Friday 10am-5pm

A Moving Ceremony: The Art of Becoming follows artist Jay Cheng across two connected bodies of work. The first, The Unseen Made Visible, draws on her experience as a medium, exploring communication, the continuation of consciousness beyond physical death and realities that exist beyond what can be immediately seen. The second looks back at her earlier life as a milliner, returning to the hat blocks, materials and inherited objects that accompanied her practice for years – finding in them, now, a dimension of meaning she hadn't previously recognised. Objects carry histories. Materials hold traces. What once appeared simply as tools for making hats has become, through the lens of her current practice, something else entirely. The exhibition explores these two chapters together, treating Cheng's past and present as parts of the same ongoing journey. Works are presented as fragments and traces of a process still in motion.

The venue, Studio 88, is located inside Sak Homestay in Doi Saket, outside the city centre. A shared shuttle service is available from Central Festival – book by September 8. Pick-up at 12.30pm, drop-off at 4.30pm. B200 per person, depending on numbers.

September 12-October 12. Studio 88 at Sak Homestay, Doi Saket. Opening reception September 12, 2pm-4pm. Dress code: black and white, hats encouraged.

A new solo exhibition at Head High Second Floor follows Chiang Mai-based artist Wanlop Hansunthai's ongoing investigation into what happens when the sacred becomes a resource. Blood of the Gods, Tears of the Sun picks up where his 2024 show Survival Sphere left off, working across painting, mixed media, sculpture, photography and installation to trace the erosion of meaning in a world of environmental crisis and social destabilisation. The premise is unsparing: that humanity is both worshipper and destroyer and that what is being consumed is not merely the planet's materials but the spiritual frameworks that once made those materials matter. 

Curated by Jirarat Chaiyarach and Reinhard Kressner, the exhibition doesn't resolve into mourning – it holds the tension between reverence and depletion, leaving open the question of whether recognition comes before or after the point of no return.

Aug 22-Oct 2. Head High Second Floor. 28/1 Singharat Road. By appointment only. Closed Wednesdays and Sundays. Opening reception August 22, 6pm onwards

One of Chiang Mai's longest-running printmaking studios is back in its original neighbourhood. C.A.P Studio, founded in 2003 by Thai artist and master printer Kitikong Tilokawattanotai, has reopened at Nimmanhaemin Soi 17 following a major renovation, closing its temporary Old City location in the process. 

The expanded space has been purpose-built for printmaking collaboration, with the studio functioning as what it calls a living lab: visitors can watch the process from production through to finished edition, speak directly with artists and printers and browse or collect works made on site. The studio specialises in hand-pulled limited edition original prints, etching and woodblock among them, developed in close collaboration with Thai and international artists for over more than two decades.

C.A.P Studio. Nimmanhaemin Soi 17. Tuesday-Saturday 10.30am-6pm

Traces of Being takes as its starting point a simple proposition: that every work of art is proof that someone once stopped, paid attention and chose to mark their existence. Suteera Fankaew's solo exhibition, curated by Chaiwat Lochotinant, builds from there into something quieter and more personal, inviting viewers to slow down against the grain of a fast-moving world and sit with the passage of time and emotion. The show is hosted within Little Shelter Box, the art space inside Little Shelter Hotel, which also participates in Galleries Nights.

Aug 7-Oct 30. Little Shelter Box, 208/25 Lamphun Road. 10am-6pm. Opening reception August 7, 7pm

A new exhibition at MAIIAM draws entirely from the museum's own collection, bringing together more than 39 Thai and international artists across painting, sculpture, photography, moving image and installation. Some works are over fifty years old, others not shown publicly in decades, all reflecting co-founder Jean-Michel Beurdeley's personal collecting eye and the philosophy that shaped MAIIAM's permanent holdings. Black runs through the show not as a single fixed thing but as a shifting state: sometimes a fragment of an image, sometimes swallowing the whole frame, moving between density and weightlessness, structure and atmosphere. The curation leans on that instability, letting black carry belief, fear, desire or memory depending on the work and the viewer standing in front of it. Rather than building toward a singular reading, the exhibition holds multiple interpretations.

Until June 21, 2027. MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum. Ton Pao, San Kamphaeng. Wed-Mon 10am-6pm