In Thailand, it is in Bangkok's new museums that the avant-garde of art is experienced

Watching the penultimate episode of the third series of The White Lotus, set in Bangkok, one question recurs: where is that villa overlooking the Chao Phraya River, whose beauty almost obscures the murder drama unfolding there? The good news is that it is not an inaccessible private residence, but a sophisticated five-room micro-hotel - Siri Sala (pictured) - offering breakfast, lunch and dinner, a massage for each guest and one experience a day, from a Thai writing class to a river cruise. The owners, Irma and Kirati Thepsoparn, had bought a traditional stilt house on the river to save it from decay. In its place, they built a villa and converted what could be saved of the original wooden structure into a room for games and aperitifs in the garden. The atmosphere is contemporary and unmistakably Thai. Irma and Kirati are up-to-date on everything that is happening in the city, and like other Bangkok entrepreneurs cultivate a passion for contemporary art, of which the city is becoming an outpost in the East.

In the past year, for example, two extraordinary private museums of Thai collectors have opened: last December it was the turn of Dib Bangkok, which looks like a monument to modernity in an area of old houses and shops. Giving the first contemporary art museum to his city was the dream of singer-songwriter and businessman Petch Osathanugrah, but he passed away in 2023, leaving the helm to his son Purat. It is located in a former steel factory, which two of Thailand's best architecture firms - WHY and A49 - have transformed into a minimalist building, while preserving the original structure. Inside, one walks through the last seventy years of art history, including timeless names like Louise Bourgeois and Rebecca Horn and Thai pioneers like Montien Boonma. There are never too many works in the light-filled rooms, leaving space and time for observation and a few must-see pieces such as Incubate, Subodh Gupta's installation of eggs made from tin cans, and James Turrell's Straight Up, the light artist's first work in Thailand. Ten minutes from the museum is Dib26, a laboratory of future-oriented ideas created in another factory, this time revamped by Supermachine, the city's leading design studio.

Looking ahead is also the philosophy of the Kunsthalle, a revolutionary gallery inaugurated a year ago: its director is Stefano Rabolli Pansera, a refined curator from Brescia who left the famous Hauser & Wirth gallery for an unknown adventure in Bangkok. He had been contacted by Marisa Chearavanont, a Thai collector and philanthropist, to ask him for advice on the purchase of a burnt-out publishing house where he could set up his museum. Thunderstruck by that building with its literary past in the heart of Chinatown, he came up with an unconventional concept, also thanks to Mrs Chearavanont who gave him carte blanche. Thus the Kunsthalle was born, a space left in its dilapidated state but with gigantic areas, exposed beams, walls without plaster. Only artists can ask for, or operate, some form of renovation in order to stage their exhibitions. Inside there is also a cinema, a workshop, rooms for performances and events and a terrace, also left as it was, where art films are shown in the evenings. The virtuous encounter between Rabolli and Chearavanont also generated the Khao Yai Art Forest, a kind of land art 2.0 installation three hours from Bangkok. In the face of such projects, says Rabolli, Europe seems to be living in the distant past, as it offers no space for so much experimentation. Whereas Thailand is hungry for ideas, and above all for a front-row seat in the present.