FACE
After experiencing the city, it’s time to reflect and reassess.
Bangkok’s reputation is a battle over face, whether through monuments, museums and tourism, or art, media and planning.
MEMORY
Monuments imply permanence, but here everything is impermanent. News and media have the means to record and contextualise what happened, yet they omit anything deemed ‘sensitive,’ due to self-censorship and private warnings. Under criminal defamation laws, truth is no defence. So we get blanks in the city’s memory. Forgetting is policy. Recent events dissolve before our very eyes, didn’t happen here. Remembering approved things is also policy. Lately, a new generation of historians, activists and indie creatives has been informing the public of the memory gaps and prompting a more inclusive story of the city that includes the taboo events, ethnicities and history-makers written out of the national narrative.
pictured: An installation by Suttee Kunavichayanont about how Thai history gets erased and rewritten
TOURIST TRAPPINGS
Bangkok has consistently been the world’s most visited city until Covid-19 paused air travel. The Thai capital was also voted Best City by readers of Travel + Leisure four years running, and places at or near the top in other polls and charts. Bangkok loves being liked, but not all agree about what swelled this lackadaisical playground into the darling of those who love cities. Mention “Bangkok” to anyone and the response won’t be neutral. But what trips peoples’ triggers about Bangkok depends on the tourists themselves, whose origin and tastes keep shifting. Adventurers and misfits, GIs on R’n’R, backpackers, foodies, mass tourists, seekers of the exotic – and increasingly Bangkokians rediscovering their roots and their neighbours.
pictured: A mall display about Kudi Jeen community to encourage Thais to visit that ancient Sino-Portuguese-Thai-Lao community.
PORTRAYALS
Courting attention, but hurt by scrutiny, Bangkok feels misunderstood. Understanding this place is hard, and many locals claim that’s not possible by non-Thais. Yet there’s a growing demand to know about what is now a major World City. More foreigners than ever are visiting, living and doing business here. There’s been a huge increase in arts, books and media coverage about the city, both for foreigners as well as by and for Bangkok’s residents. Bangkok had been a word-of-mouth city; now it’s becoming a known city. See portrayals of the city though every medium, from film to sci-fi, novels to lyrics, cartoons to street photography.
pictured: Students at the Thammasat-Chulalongkorn Univeristy annual football match parade satirical floats like this one of the Great Flood of 2011.
TIDES
This unruly city goes through waves of chaos and order, protest and crackdown, planning and free-for-all. While some see salvation in top-down Singapore-like tidiness, others revel in the contradictions and diversity of ‘Messy Urbanism’. As rising seas threaten, this resilient city faces a return to its amphibious origins, coping with water as it copes with everything else, with a multiplicity of ad hoc adaptation. Whatever happens it will remain a city of surprise.
pictured: A Chao Phraya River expressboat darts between a cargo barge and another expressboat with a slogan on its roof saying “#risk everything”