If your Bangkok itinerary is all street food and temples, consider a detour to Yaowarat 1, where the small gallery Atelier 9 is hosting an art show with an unusual material at its centre: waste cardboard.

"To Hold, To Be Held" is a solo exhibition by Jeon Gi-ok, a Seoul-born, Bangkok-based multimedia artist whose work turns discarded packaging into something quietly poetic. Running until 20 December, the show gathers paintings, sculptural installations and spatial works built around a simple idea — that everything that endures, endures because something else is holding it up.

Cardboard is a smart choice for that theme. It's a material we associate with carrying, protecting and throwing away. Gi-ok folds, paints and stacks it into landscapes that lean on each other in precarious balance, architectural forms, and thousands of tiny hand-folded boats. Viewed from across the room, the boats read as a heap of rubbish; up close, each individual vessel emerges, carrying the accumulated traces of the artist's studio practice — a nice metaphor for how collective things are made of individual effort.

The exhibition isn't just look-and-move-on. Painted images sit partially hidden inside cardboard boxes, so you have to peer in to find them. Circular structures let visitors step physically inside the landscape. Folding screens reveal their paintings gradually, through movement and time. It rewards slower looking — a welcome contrast to the sensory overload of Chinatown just around the corner.

At its core, the show asks you to notice the invisible networks of care and support that keep everyday life going: landscapes held by their containers, structures sustained by their neighbours, boats afloat only because water carries them. That's a meditative premise, but the hands-on, walk-through presentation keeps it accessible even if you normally give galleries a miss.

For travellers, this is an easy add-on to a Yaowarat (Bangkok Chinatown) outing — pair it with an evening food crawl on Yaowarat Road, since the gallery sits right in the neighbourhood. Opening hours are Friday to Sunday, 11am to 8pm; Monday to Thursday visits are by appointment only, arranged via info@atelier9bangkok.com. Admission details aren't listed in the announcement, so it's worth emailing ahead if you're planning a weekday trip.

If you're in Bangkok before 20 December and fancy a slower hour between noodle stops, this is a low-effort, high-reward stop — and a chance to see how much can be held together by the humblest material going.