A few hours northeast of Bangkok, you’ll find Khao Yai Art Forest, a landscape once devastated by intensive agriculture, now rehabilitated as an art forest. The project has a more site-specific, curatorial ethos than a traditional sculpture park. Its artistic director, Stefano Rabolli Pansera, has gone so far as to call the conventional land-art park “a virus”: “I find it outdated to simply place artworks in nature,” he told Domus, adding that he feels the same way about calling in star architects to create something “iconic and spectacular.”
Among the installations is Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Forest, a layer of artificially generated mist that constantly shifts with the weather and wind, but whose moisture will eventually change the forest too, fostering new plants and flowers. Nearby, Louise Bourgeois’s Maman — one of the monumental spiders more often found in urban plazas — suddenly feels almost natural among the tall trees and new growth. Pansera says that here, it “seems to shrink back into what it truly is — a small insect in the wild.”
Our favorite, though, is K-BAR, a remarkably metropolitan six-seat cocktail bar that almost anywhere else might disappear among a hundred other dimly lit rooms. Here, it stands entirely on its own: a roughly 500-square-foot box of glass, steel, leather, and backlit bottles hidden in the forest.
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The artist duo behind it, Elmgreen & Dragset, is the same one behind Prada Marfa, which bears a remarkable resemblance: a permanently closed luxury storefront in the middle of the West Texas desert, and a favorite stop for the road-tripping influencer class.
And, as much as we love a good desert backdrop, what makes K-BAR more interesting to us than Prada Marfa is the relationship it has with the land, despite seeming so obviously out of place.
Displacement and denial have long been central to Elmgreen & Dragset’s work: take something familiar, put it somewhere it doesn’t belong, then withhold the thing it appears to promise. It heightens your awareness of both the object and the landscape around it.
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And at Khao Yai, where you start by wondering whether the cocktail bar is even real, you end up noticing the forest too. How much of it was here before the cassava farms? Which parts are new? How much of what looks natural has actually been planted, restored, or even watered by the fog?
K-BAR is real, though. Once a month it opens, and if you’re lucky enough to snag one of the six seats, you get to go inside.
