Thailand and biennial art festival : the case study of Bangkok Art Biennale 2018, Bangkok Biennial, and Thailand Biennale

Abstract

This thesis examines biennial art festivals in Thailand, namely Bangkok Art Biennale 2018, Bangkok Biennial and Thailand Biennale. Each festival had a different type of biennial respectively and all represented the first biennial in Thailand. The biennial art festival can be traced back to the world fairs and grand tours in Europe. In the 19th century, Siamese elite conducted a grand tour to Europe and participated in world fairs. As Thongchai (2000, 540) illustrates that Siamese elite believed that their participation in major world fairs would increase their recognition and elevate their status on the global stage, the biennials organizers in 2018 also believed that the biennial would raise the Thailand’s cultural status on the global stage and set the city and themselves on the global art map. The thesis aims to depict the cooperative space production as the biennial by the state, private sectors, and art professionals. It analyses the politics of aesthetics on vague imagination of world class city.