A Rainy Afternoon at the BACC — Art, Massage, and Cat Videos in Bangkok

It was raining. Bangkok rain in the afternoon — the kind that arrives without warning and makes the city smell like wet concrete and something floral underneath. I went to the BACC because I was already on the BTS and the rain made the decision for me.

The Bangkok Art and Culture Centre is a round building at the Siam intersection, all curved white corridors and open atria, surrounded by a city that does not always know what to do with contemporary art but fills the building anyway because it is free to enter and air-conditioned and there is a coffee shop on the ground floor.

The Art

I walked the spiral ramp that goes from the ground floor to the upper galleries. The current exhibition was Thai contemporary art — large canvases, some installation work, a video piece in a dark room that I watched for six minutes without fully understanding and then found I was thinking about for an hour after I left. That is either good art or I was in a susceptible mood. Probably both.

The BACC is not the grand museum that Bangkok deserves and does not yet have. It is a mid-size gallery space with limited permanent collection, running on a combination of municipal funding and commercial tenants on the lower floors. But it is the best contemporary art space in the city and it anchors a neighbourhood — Pathumwan, around the Siam and National Stadium BTS stations — that has become Bangkok’s most interesting cultural district.

The Massage

After the galleries I found a massage place nearby. Two hours, 600 baht. The therapist’s name was Maii. She worked without speaking, which is my preference — the kind of professional silence that acknowledges you came for the bodywork and not the conversation. Two hours of Thai massage for 600 baht is approximately seventeen dollars. There is a point at which the Bangkok cost-of-living calculation stops making sense and just has to be accepted as a different system of value.

The Work

I had brought my laptop to the coffee shop before the massage. I reviewed three contracts in ninety minutes at a table near the window with the rain still going outside. Twenty to thirty clients at any given time, three contracts reviewed in an afternoon at an art museum cafe. The city keeps moving around the work.

I also made a cat video that day. For a law firm. A client had asked whether we could produce short video content for their social media — something that would make their posts visible in the algorithm. The answer was apparently cats. We made a short video with a cat explaining a legal concept. It worked. The algorithm liked it. Madness works.

What the BACC Area Is

The blocks around BACC — stretching toward MBK on one side and Jim Thompson House on the other — contain a concentration of things that do not usually sit this close together: contemporary art galleries, a major shopping mall, a heritage silk house museum, street food on the canal, the National Stadium, and a series of small independent shops and cafes in the lanes between the main roads.

It is also where Bangkok feels most like a city that contains multitudes simultaneously. You exit the gallery and there is a street vendor selling grilled pork skewers for twenty baht. You turn left and there is a boutique selling handmade ceramics for twelve thousand baht. Both are authentic. The city does not resolve this tension into a coherent aesthetic. It just holds all of it at once.

I walked back to the BTS in the rain that had slowed to a drizzle. I had reviewed contracts, seen art, eaten something, had a two-hour massage, made a cat video, and the day was not yet over. Bangkok days compress differently than days in other cities. More tends to fit in them.

“And parts of me are shrinking,” I wrote in a note that afternoon. I am not entirely sure what I meant. Something about the gap between the life the city offers and the life you are actually managing to live inside it. The art had probably done something to my mood. The massage had loosened something else. Bangkok on a rainy afternoon will do that to you if you let it.