Bangkok's VS Gallery is running two contemporary Thai exhibitions side by side this month, and together they make a good excuse for an art-forward afternoon in the capital. Both shows are on until December 28.
The first, by Sittidham Rohitasuk, goes by the tongue-twisting title "The Story Of An Art Student Who Dreams Of Becoming A Conceptual Artist But Fails: The Case Of Sittidech Rohitasuk". It uses artificial intelligence to stage a conversation between the artist and his younger self — Sittidech, the birth name he abandoned years later for health reasons — across a gap of 24 years. Presented as a mockumentary, the work has the present-day artist interrogating the ambitions of the 24-year-old he once was, and sitting with the idea that the dream may not have worked out. Alongside it, he revisits his earlier pieces to argue that when the destination stays out of reach, the process still counts as something valuable. It's a show that will resonate with anyone who gave up on a plan and wonders what it was all for.
Next door, Kittiya Reangrob's "As I Grow My Garden" comes out of a very different place: the death of her father. For Kittiya, painting is a form of processing grief and working through questions of relationships, gender and queer identity. Her visual language borrows from South Korean manhwa comics — all soft lines and cute, dreamy figures — but she pushes the style somewhere rawer, depicting her female subjects with unflinching honesty rather than gloss.
The title riffs on "the garden I grow" as a metaphor for personal growth. Her canvases fill with plants at different stages and in different colours, tracking an inner evolution, all set against a working-class neighbourhood backdrop that she describes as chaotic yet beautiful, painful yet authentic. The through-line is what it costs, and what it gives you, to be true to yourself.
For travellers, this is a slice of Bangkok beyond temples and street food. VS Gallery sits in the city's contemporary art circuit, and shows like these — small, personal, free of the blockbuster price tag — are an easy half-hour to slot between a chabaa coffee and dinner. If you're in town before the end of December, you can catch both in one visit and get a sense of where Thai art is heading: introspective, digitally curious, and unafraid of mixing AI, comics and grief on the same wall.
Details are thin on opening hours, so check the gallery's Facebook page (facebook.com/VSGalleryBangkok) before you go — and pair the trip with the nearby Bangkok Art and Culture Centre if you want to make a full day of it.
