Ghost’s Final Edition Haunts an Ever-Changing Bangkok

The city of Bangkok has fascinated me ever since my first time here, in 2020, in the very early days of the COVID-19 outbreak and before the world shut down. On that initial visit I found myself enthralled by the continuous roar of traffic, the delicious smells of street food wafting from every soi (side street), the clash of the ornate, curving temple architecture with the techno-modernist malls, the rollicking nightlife, the tourist sleaze. It felt like a real city that never sleeps – like New York used to be – with its multidisciplinary, punkish art scene whose figures seemed to glide effortlessly between the worlds of art, experimental music and cinema. This is very much the freewheeling realm that gave rise to Ghost, conceived as a sort of anti-biennial dedicated to installation and performance art by two of the city’s native sons and leading art world protagonists, artist Korakrit Arunanondchai and Bangkok CityCity Gallery owner Akapol Op Sudasna. Ghost was only ever meant to exist for three editions, and I sadly missed the first two, in 2018 and 2022. Knowing that this year’s, ‘Ghost 2568: Wish We Were Here’, would be the last, I had my excuse for a longed-for third visit to what is increasingly being hyped as the rising art hub of southeast Asia.

The ethos of the festival is rooted equally in the supernatural and spiritual that continue to play a key role in quotidian life for much of the Thai populace and in a sense of urban exploration; combined, they invoke an alternate psychogeography for Bangkok. As such, site-specificity was key. Inside a traditional Thai dwelling that almost perfectly resembled the one she grew up in by one of the capital’s train stations, where her parents worked as food vendors, Berlin-based artist Orawan Arunrak transformed the rooms into the interior of a train carriage with the help of a video installation. Here the artist serenaded the audience-cum-passengers live with self-penned nirat, an ancient form of Thai poetry written by travellers to express longing for home – a powerful evocation of Arunrak’s own itinerancy over the past few years (Nirat of Parallel Rails, 2025).

Next door, at the Asvin Cultural and Contemporary Art Space – an atmospheric, factory-like building that once played host to the country’s first film studios – a three-floor installation by Koki Tanaka, Activating Archive: Eating an Apple while Lucid Dreaming 2568 (2025), revisited his interactive project for the last edition of Ghost, which took participants on an all-night bus ride through Bangkok in a communal exercise of lucid dreaming (Eating an Apple While Lucid Dreaming, 2022). The installation presented an archive of that event, including documentary video footage, interviews with many of the participants (as well as the bus drivers) and source texts on lucid dreaming. Continuing in this transient vein was the contribution of Raqs Media Collective, whose project ‘18 Personae’ offered a continuous roster of participatory activities spread throughout the city – from karaoke in a cemetery to a witchcraft workshop and beyond – allowing visitors and residents alike to explore how certain local subcultures, perhaps unseen or hitherto unexplored, thrive.

Those exhibiting in more traditional exhibition spaces often opted to bring an expansive hauntology, with roots in the city and the wider region, inside. At CityCity’s main gallery, Dan Lie’s installation Patience (2025) was composed of bundles of white chrysanthemums procured from Bangkok’s famed Pak Khlong Talat market. During the day, the installation becomes a sort of play without actors; sitting on white bleachers at the rear of the gallery, you can watch as lights illuminate different parts of the installation before fading to darkness. But on the opening night of Ghost, the space was activated further, those bleachers serving as a stage for the very much alive spirits that the youthful crowd had turned out in droves to see: the experimental noise duo Senyawa, followed by the high energy, Gabba-inflected stylistics of Nuh Peace. At the Jim Thompson Art Center, a three-channel video by Komtouch Napattaloong, Kaisa Saarinen and Bart Seng Wen Long, These Laticifers Keep Bleeding… (2025), pummelled another spectre for the wider region: the legacy of colonialism. The work looks at the history of rubber plantations – a crop that is not indigenous to Southeast Asia – controlled by European colonial powers, together with an exploration of the rubber fetish scene that has been evolving throughout the past decade in Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. Also on site, in Reading by an Artist (2025), the Singaporean artist John Clang offered one-on-one readings of visitors’ Chinese astrological charts in order to produce ‘metaphysical portraits’ – these sessions being a personal highlight for many attendees. As Clang revealed during an artist talk, this facet of his practice is rooted in his own early encounters with a ghost.

Towards the end of the second week of the festival, tragedy struck: the death of former Thai queen Sirikit, mother of the current King Vajiralongkorn. This occurred just days before one of the much-anticipated highlights of the festival, Paul Pfeiffer’s specially commissioned performance Match of Legend, which was to take place in the massive Rajadamnern Muay Thai stadium. The death of a royal family member in Thailand is usually followed by a weeks-long official mourning period, and most forms of public entertainment and celebration must be cancelled. The government announced that no such mandates would be enforced this time, though it quickly became clear that this was a sensitive issue – one that was difficult for a visiting writer to probe, given the country’s strict laws against defaming the royal family. Suffice to say that the boxing stadium’s position on the route of the queen mother’s funeral procession meant that the performance would have to be postponed.

The death of a royal is, of course, an ironic event to disrupt Ghost, which itself has faced a number of organizational hurdles – not least those provoked by its very name, which speaks to a complex semiotic system that is largely invisible or indiscernible to a Western audience, particularly those coming from secular or Abrahamic religious backgrounds. In the sophisticated system of Thai belief, which fuses animism with Theravada Buddhism, ghosts are real and widely believed in. The festival’s name meant that many local spaces were reluctant to grant access to the organizers, fearful of what might be released by the spirits dwelling within. Stories abounded of the past two editions of Ghost, when video equipment didn’t function in specific venues until special rituals were carried out or offerings made.

Despite these apt disruptions, Ghost has succeeded, through its three iterations, in paving new ways to explore and inhabit this captivating city. Far from receding into the ether, memories of it will likely continue to haunt, serving as a prologue to next month’s opening of Dib Bangkok, the country’s first museum dedicated to contemporary art. For those of us lucky enough to become viewer-participants, it was more than just another art event; it was a context-rich deep dive into a city on the rise – a city that makes me sadder to leave with each visit.

_{Main image: Raqs Media Collective, 18 Personae/Singing Home at the Teochew Cemetery Park, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Ghost 2565;  Photo: Kanich Khajohnsri}