Within ‘Giving Life’, the second show at the new DiB museum of contemporary art in Bangkok, sits a gleeful disruption: a video game. Nawin Nuthong's Project 147, the first Chanel Gateway Commission, sends a small child through a series of animated vignettes in pursuit of a single question: what is history? Tree nymphs from Thai folklore and a trail of nostalgic artefacts serve as clues, and there is no neat conclusion.
'What I love about contemporary art is that it's a space to ask questions and probably answer each one with another five questions!' says Nuthong, who was born in 1993, raised in Bangkok and trained in film. Visitors build their own avatars, which appear on a giant screen that's refreshed each day. 'The visual and narrative style of gaming has become a global language,' says Miwako Tezuka, director of DiB. 'People will connect. People will understand.'
The commission inaugurates the Chanel Culture Fund's partnership with DiB, the fund's first major alliance with a Southeast Asian art institution, and it lands at a tipping point. 'There is this amazing energy of music, of architecture, of design and of experimentation in Thailand,' says Yana Peel, president of arts, culture & heritage at Chanel. 'In this renaissance, it's not a birth but a rebirth, a chance to really flourish in a way that can be a gateway to the region.'
The country, she says, has already given the world Rirkrit Tiravanija, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gridthiya Gaweewong and, of course, Yantrasast himself. 'With Nuthong, there's the Trojan horse of the video game that's bringing people into the museum and then asking these existential questions like what is the hero's journey? What are the dragons you need to slay? What is the history? What is the future?' says Peel.
For Nuthong, it’s a breakthrough. 'This is the first time that I get close to the public,' says the artist.
'I'm quite fascinated by gaming: the phenomenon, the excitement, the participation, the distraction, the friendships that are made and where technology is going. In [Chanel’s] first Next Prize cohort [in 2024], we had a game designer named Sam Eng in Brooklyn who that award,' says Peel.
Opened in December 2025 (when we toured its architecture), DiB is a bold, brilliant, privately owned and funded museum, conceived by its founding chairman, Purat ‘Chang’ Osathanugrah. His mission was to open the collection amassed by his father, Petch Osathanugrah, to the public and create a new magnet for national culture. 'The questions I asked myself in founding this museum started with: what do we leave behind when we're not around? What is legacy? And how can I turn my father's dream, a private collection, into what I believe Bangkok deserves as a museum?' says Chang. At 33, he must be one of the youngest museum founders in the world.
The 1,000-strong collection spans the OGs of Thai art, among them Montien Boonma (1953-2000), whose spiritual works fill an entire floor of the just-opened exhibition, ‘Giving Life’, as well as the new guard and international names with strong bonds to Thailand, from Anselm Kiefer to Alexander Calder. 'We serve as a bridge between Thailand and the world, bridging the old Bangkok, the old heritage, with our current cultural identity,' says Chang, who also grew up playing video games. 'It's about rediscovering and reinventing what used to be overlooked in our heritage, the craftsmanship, the music, the clothes, the venues, and owning it.'
That life is palpable. Yantrasast has transformed a disused steel warehouse into a 7,000 sq m museum arranged around a sweeping courtyard, and its crisp geometric lines give the building both the discipline of a gallery and the ease of a civic stage. Cinema, performance and talks are as much at home here as the art on the walls. The industrial bones remain legible, but nothing about the place feels like a shed with pictures in it.
Is it architecture, a sculpture, or a warehouse full of wonderful art? Kulapat Yantrasast asks the question himself. 'Museums exist in many ways, and this is a balance of those,' says the Thai architect, founder of WHY Architecture. 'Of course it's a converted warehouse, but it has its own life, its own spirit.'
Across the sprawling city that renaissance is grassroots and tangible. Bangkok Kunsthalle founded three years ago, Bangkok CityCity Gallery and the Jim Thompson Art Center anchor a wider network of studios drawing new waves of artists, while Thai artists who left are coming home. 'I think within at least the arts field in Thailand, there's not a lot of top-down approach to it. What you see today is really organic in its expression,' says Chang.
For Chanel, which does not build museums of its own, the model is partnership. 'The idea is to identify the best people with the best ideas in the best cities, who are able to partner with us in a way that's very enduring and long-term,' says Peel. The fund's patronage now spans 50 projects in 15 countries, among them a film restoration project at M+ in Hong Kong and a contemporary art library at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, following a lineage Gabrielle Chanel began in the 1920s as patron to Cocteau, Dalí, Stravinsky and Diaghilev.
To mark the opening of Nawin Nuthong’s Chanel Gateway Commission at DiB Bangkok, luminaries of the region's art world, from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Korea, gathered for dinner in the museum's underground carpark, made over into a banqueting hall. It was a fitting use of Yantrasast's building: a warehouse that keeps finding new lives.
The commission is on show as part of ‘Giving Life’ until 5 May 2027, dibbangkok.org