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Marisa Chearavanont, a Thai-Korean arts patron, grew up visiting South Korea’s museums from a young age, nurturing a passion for art. She even tried her hand at making art, but quickly gave it up, and then began collecting more than 30 years ago, shortly after she got married. “My collecting is for my two eyes only,” she told ARTnews of her holdings, which focus on Southeast Asian artists. “When I look at my collection, it says more about my life journey than about art itself.”
Instead of amassing a major art collection, however, Chearavanont’s focus has always been promoting artists from the region, especially Thailand, her husband’s home country. She operated a gallery space in Hong Kong to promote these artists for three years beginning in 1999, but closed it to focus on raising her four children. More recently, she has sat on Tate Modern’s Asia Pacific Acquisition Committee and has supported the New Museum in New York and M+ in Hong Kong.
Now that her children are older, Chearavanont said she’s ready to begin what she called “my own chapter—a Marisa chapter. Now, I have to think about what I want to be and what I want to do. At my age, people are retiring. But this is the whole new horizon for me, so I decided to do something with the resources I have for Thailand, since I’m here again.”
Chearavanont moved back to Thailand in 2019 after living in Hong Kong for 21 years. In the two decades since, Bangkok has become a much more international city, she said, with better infrastructure and stronger commerce, tourism, and hospitality sectors. While Thailand has a thriving artist community and two well-regarded international biennials, Chearavanont said that the country still lacks a robust arts infrastructure in terms of contemporary art museums and patronage. Her latest project, Khao Yai Art, aims to change that.
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“I want to bridge the gap,” she said. “When we go to Hong Kong for the auctions, for example, we hardly see Thai artists, and I feel that the Thai artists who are there are undervalued. I want to use my resources to give Thai people access to international art and to help our local artists receive exposure outside Thailand.”
To realize this project, Chearavanont tapped Stefano Rabolli Pansera, a former director at Hauser & Wirth, to serve as director of Khao Yai Art, which includes two main components: the Khao Yai Art Forest in the countryside (opening February 2) and the Bangkok Kunsthalle in the capital city (opened in January 2024).
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Chearavanont’s return to Thailand was marked almost immediately by the onset of the pandemic and lockdown. During this time, she and her family were living in the country home near Khao Yai National Park, about three hours northwest of Bangkok. “The only time that I felt energized was when I was walking in the forest. That was a first time that I began to pay attention to nature,” she said. “I had never really closed my eyes and felt the breeze of the wind and pause. It was a kind of blessing—this intimate time with nature.”
Chearavanont began thinking about “how all of us need a kind of healing” in the coming years. “I wanted art to be part of this healing medium for us,” she said. The world was already filled with dozens upon dozens private museums and outdoor sculpture gardens founded by collectors. She thought about how she could do something different in this crowded landscape. She decided on an “art forest,” or SilaPaa, a hybrid of the Thai words for “art” (Silapa) and “forest” (Paa).
She began looking for a large tract of land where she could create a destination that would combine nature, art, and architecture. She eventually found around 65 hectares of land, the site of what would become Khao Yai Art Forest. Chearavanont was attracted to the site’s history, a formerly dense forest that had been cleared for monoculture farming around the mid-1970s. She sees Khao Yai Art Forest as a kind of reforestation project. “I would like to heal the land through art,” she said.
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Chearavanont and Pansera have invited a number of international arts to visit Khao Yai Art Forest to create site-specific works that are inspired by what they encounter and using materials found on the grounds, from rocks to mud and water. Among the four initial works are Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Forest; a sculpture made of two large stones, titled GOD, by Italian artist Francesco Arena; Pilgrimage to Eternity, an earth-based work using soil and water from the grounds, by Thai artist Ubatsat; and K-BAR by Danish duo Elmgreen & Dragset that is a permanent six-seat pavilion-cum-bar dedicated to German artist Martin Kippenberger.
Chearavanont said, “I told the artists, ‘Please create art about the healing, love, care, positiveness, so whoever come to this land can absorb it and leave with positiveness.’ This is a new paradigm.”
Acquisitions of existing works that feel appropriate to the site will also find a home here. So far, the Art Forest includes four non-commissioned works: a Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture, Mamam (1999–2002); Richard Long’s stone circle installation, Madrid Circle (1988); a series of wooden sculptures, Nouns Slipping into Verbs, by Richard Nonas; and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s “Two Planets” series of videos of people reacting to reproductions of European masterworks installed in nature.
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Khao Yai Art Forest will likely grow in the years to come, but Chearavanont said she doesn’t have a set schedule for it, like a museum might. Instead, she wants it to grow organically. Artists may be invited annually, but they will be given however much time is needed to realize their installations, from a few months to even years if needed.
“As we reject the idea of sculpture park, we even reject the method of filling the space at all costs,” Pansera said. “We do not have a prefigured idea that we want to impose onto the site. Everything emerges from the conversations with the artists.”
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Though the Art Forest officially opens on February 2, Chearavanont said a forest can never really just open. “I don’t want to call that an opening, but a beginning. Everything is still in progress.”
Initially, Chearavanont had planned a restaurant for the Khao Yai Art Forest where visitors could enjoy meals made from ingredients sustainably sourced from the property. A three-month delay because of heavy rains caused her to reconsider. She realized the building did not fit in with the forest, and she ordered the construction to come to a halt. Now, she hopes that the natural vegetation will eventually grow around the abandoned construction project.
“We are embracing nature,” she said. “We have to be patient. We have to resilient. We have to be flexible. We have to be creative about it because nature will not give you a predictive environment.”
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This approach is connected to how Chearavanont and Pansera have designed the programming for the Bangkok Kunsthalle. Located in the Thai Wattana Panich building, a former printing house for educational textbooks in Bangkok’s Chinatown neighborhood, this project is also a form of adaptive reuse. The building was abandoned more than 30 years ago when the Thai government ended the printing company’s monopoly on textbooks, and its interiors were significantly damaged after a fire in 2001. Like with the Art Forest site, Chearavanont also came upon this building by chance as she was initially looking for a colonial-era building when she learned of Thai Wattana Panich.
“When I visited, I just couldn’t believe that the volume of the building’s patina. The ash running down the walls, for me, created a natural artwork,” she said. “Nothing is coincidence for me—I feel that it’s a part of destiny.” She immediately decided to purchase it in order to save it from being demolished by a developer who might instead raze it to build a shopping mall or office building.
While basic infrastructure updates, like air conditioning, elevators, and toilets, have been done, the building, in its mostly derelict state, has been left as is. In the coming years, the building will also change via interventions by artists, like one by Korakrit Arunanondchai, in which he mixed black paint with the ash from the fire to paint the floor in part of the building.
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“I see this Kunsthalle as an anti-architecture, a counter-architecture because we believe that the growth finds its own form,” Pansera said. “An architectural method is based on a vision that the architect imposes onto a building, but when you work with nature, nature grows. We needed to resist the temptation of doing too much, and the more we resist, and the more we let the artists respond to the building, the better it is.”
Even though kunsthalle is a German word that might be unfamiliar to many Thai people, Chearavanont wanted to use the word in the name to signal the rigor of contemporary art exhibitions, including an active performance art program, it plans to mount. Since its opening, the Bangkok Kunsthalle has mounted solo shows for Arunanondchai, Yoko Ono, and Michel Auder, who was the space’s inaugural artist-in-residence. It currently has on view a show for late Post-Minimalist sculptor Richard Nonas, and a solo exhibition for late Thai artist Tang Chang will open February 1.
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While both projects are still in their early stages, Chearavanont and Pansera hope that they will transform the Thai art scene, not only by adding two international art institutions but through their approach of healing through art and nature.
“We are operating in the urban jungle of Bangkok and in the natural forest of Khao Yai forest,” Pansera said. “The method that we engage is the same.It is about healing, not restoring.” For the Kunsthalle that means “taking care of the building by doing the minimum to be able to domesticate the building,” while with the Art Forest the focus is on “healing a beautiful plot of land that was, in a way, hurt by extensive by intensive agriculture” with the aim of giving “new energy to the landscape.”
Chearavanont added, “They are inseparable but just in two different locations. The DNA is the same. The spirit is the same.”