The writer is the former Director of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and a curator-historian.
After four years as Director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, I have been thinking about what it means to leave a place that has occupied a significant part of my life. Not just the meetings, exhibitions, budgets, deadlines and endless conversations, but the small, ordinary moments that remind me why such a place matters in the first place. A group of students being prepped before entering galleries. Friends meeting after work. A visitor disagreeing with an artwork, sometimes quite passionately. Artists visiting exhibitions by their friends. Children running through a space that adults have carefully designed for contemplation. These moments do not appear in annual institutional reports. Yet, to me, they are among the most important measures of success.
Running a public art institution is a peculiar responsibility, to say the least. You are expected to protect artistic freedom while navigating regulations, financial limitations, public expectations and the competing interests of many people. You must think about the future while solving problems that demand your attention today. And you quickly learn that believing in the value of art is rather different from ensuring that an institution can continue to support it.
There have been moments of tremendous joy. Watching young artists realise ambitious projects, seeing colleagues grow into their responsibilities, witnessing strangers become absorbed in conversations they might never have had elsewhere. There is something profoundly rewarding about creating the conditions for things to happen without necessarily knowing what those things will be.
But there have also been worries.
I worry about how easily we measure cultural institutions through numbers. Visitor figures, revenue, attendance and economic impact are important, of course. Public institutions must remain accountable. Yet numbers rarely tell us whether someone has expanded their mind, discovered a new perspective or felt, perhaps for the first time, that their voice belongs in a public conversation.
I worry, too, about our growing discomfort with disagreement. We often speak about making art accessible, welcoming and inclusive. But inclusivity cannot simply mean making everyone comfortable with what they encounter. A genuinely public space must allow people to question, challenge and occasionally unsettle one another. Freedom of expression is not particularly meaningful if it extends only to opinions we already agree with.
Perhaps this is why I have always imagined an art centre as a kind of living room for the city.
Not a perfectly furnished living room where everyone must behave, but one where people feel sufficiently at home to stay, speak, listen, argue, create and return. A place where young people can experiment without fearing failure, where different generations encounter one another, and where communities recognise that culture is something they participate in rather than something presented to them. Such a place cannot be built through architecture or programming alone. It requires trust, patience, care and a willingness to share authority. Above all, it requires an institution to understand that the public is not merely its audience, but part of its reason for existing.
This feels increasingly urgent as we cycle through these extraordinary technological transformations, minute by minute. Artificial intelligence has changed how we produce knowledge, understand creativity and assign value to human labour. Tasks once associated with expertise, imagination, and years of learning can now be performed or emulated in seconds. We are being asked, perhaps more urgently than ever, what makes human contribution meaningful. I do not believe art spaces can answer these questions alone. But I believe they can provide something increasingly precious: room to consider them together. Art reminds us that knowledge is not only information, but creativity is also not only production, and human worth cannot be reduced to efficiency. Our capacity to empathise, disagree, hesitate, make mistakes and imagine alternatives remains essential to how societies develop.
As I leave BACC, my hope is not simply that more art centres will be built, but that more genuinely public spaces will be protected and sustained. Places where culture is understood as a public necessity rather than a luxury, and where the freedom to think differently is recognised as something worth defending. Four years have taught me that institutions are never finished. They are continually shaped by the people who enter them, work within them, question them and care enough to demand more from them. Perhaps that is what I will miss most. Not the institution as a building, but the possibility it holds.
And perhaps that is what I hope we never lose.
