{"id":2202251,"date":"2026-10-15T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2202251"},"modified":"2026-10-15T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T06:00:00","slug":"collector-chang-osathanugrah-reflects-on-seeing-art-with-fresh-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2202251","title":{"rendered":"Collector Chang Osathanugrah Reflects on Seeing Art with Fresh Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I hadn\u2019t expected a talking <\/strong>frog to remind me of why I fell in love with contemporary art, and I certainly hadn\u2019t expected to lose it before I ever had the chance to buy it.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn March, during a stretch of cool weather that reminds me why I still love Hong Kong, even when it no longer feels quite like the place I remember, I came across Ryan Gander\u2019s 2025 sculpture You Complete Me, or I see things you can\u2019t see (A Frog\u2019s Tale)<\/em> at Esther Schipper\u2019s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong. In the surreal work, a hyperreal frog perched in a potted plant speaks in the voice of a young girl, whose dialogue moves through a stream of existential musing, both innocent and eerily profound. It was like entering a fairy tale that understood something true about being human. The gallerist delivered the news with the gentleness reserved for a hopeful collector: the work was not available. Someone else, it turned out, had already claimed the frog. I have long made peace with losing works to other collectors, but losing this one cut deeper than past ones had.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat the piece did, before I learned I couldn\u2019t have it, was interrupt a fatigue I had begun to accept as ordinary, and one I doubt is mine alone. Call it art fair fatigue, or something closer to a low-key art world malaise; either diagnosis feels apt, and I suspect half the convention center that week was nursing the same undiagnosed condition. For a few minutes, I was not thinking about price, provenance, market cycles, or where a work sat within the artist\u2019s practice. I was not evaluating anything at all. I was simply looking, the way I did as a child. That giddy feeling has stayed with me since.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a small consolation, Gander is already in the collection of Dib Bangkok, the private museum that was my father\u2019s lifelong dream and that we opened at the end of 2025, two years after his death. Ahead of the museum\u2019s inauguration, we acquired Gander\u2019s Untouched Idea Machines<\/em> (2025), a wall-mounted brass dispenser that prints out one of some 2,000 unrealized ideas for artworks at the press of a button. We plan to put it on view in our second show this fall. Under the circumstances, it seemed only fitting to go home with an idea rather than a frog.<\/p>\n

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\"Composite<\/div>\n<\/div>
Clockwise from top left, James Turrell: Straight Up<\/em>, 2025; Alicja Kwade: Little Triple<\/em>Be-Hide<\/em>, 2023;
Ryan Gander: Idea Machine<\/em>, 2024; and Paul Chan: 2nd Light<\/em>, 2006, all in the collection of Dib Bangkok.<\/span>Clockwise from top left: Photo Watcharapong Sermwichitchai\/Courtesy Dib Bangkok; Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York\/\u00a9Alicja Kwade; Photo Andrea Rossetti\/\u00a92025 Ryan Gande and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn\/Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin, Paris, Seoul; Courtesy BANK\/MABSOCIETY Gallery, Shanghai<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

This was also one of the least <\/strong>traveled years I have had in some time: business responsibilities, it turns out, have their own gravity, and this year has kept me literally grounded in Bangkok, with only brief trips to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore, including a panel at Art SG on the responsibilities of building museums today.<\/p>\n

\n\tA Shanghai trip came in late April, ostensibly for a Monocle <\/em>talk to a room of entrepreneurs, though the real draw was at a viewing room on Taicang Road, in the old French Concession, where a series of Paul Chan works were being considered for Dib\u2019s collection, including 2nd Light<\/s><\/em> (2006). A part of Chan\u2019s \u201cSeven Lights\u201d series, this now 20-year-old installation features shadows of trees, flags, and falling figures drifting across the floor in light alone, the room taking on the quality of a dream where beauty and fragility coexist. Light, I realized, can be as expressive as pigment or bronze, and this work asked only that I dwell a little longer in the uncertainty than felt comfortable, which is perhaps closer to what experiencing art should be.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, I keep returning to one question, and a guiding one for Dib: Where does depth meet accessibility? Can a deeply considered work remain intellectually rewarding while still speaking to someone encountering it for the very first time? I do not believe those two worlds are as far apart as we tend to assume.<\/p>\n

\n\tWatching thousands of first-time visitors move through Dib this year has only confirmed it. Experienced collectors don\u2019t necessarily see more than beginners; we simply know more, and that is not<\/em> the same thing. Children rarely ask what movement a work belongs to. They ask why it feels alive, or why it seems strange. Expertise can overwhelm wonder if we allow it to. The challenge is not learning more about art. It is remembering how to look at it. That really has been the personal question for me these past months: How does one keep seeing art with fresh eyes after so many years of looking at it?<\/p>\n

\n\tSadly, I had to forego the Venice Biennale this year; business kept me in Bangkok. But our director Miwako Tezuka went on Dib\u2019s behalf and came back talking about Lorna Simpson\u2019s exhibition, \u201cThird Person\u201d at Punta della Dogana, one of two Venice exhibition spaces of fellow Top 200 Collector Fran\u00e7ois Pinault. What struck Miwako most was Stacked Stones\/Vibrating Cycles <\/em>(2020), an installation of stacked stones crowned with singing bowls that visitors are invited to sound themselves. The tones rising off it, she said, echoed the late artist Montien Boonma\u2019s view of art as practice rather than spectacle, gently urging humility over hubris. Hearing about that piece, my FOMO was very real.<\/p>\n

\n\tMiwako said she took something else away from the bowls when she sounded them herself, something close to home. She said it was the closest thing she\u2019d experienced all year to something our first show had been reaching for. \u201c(In)visible Presence\u201d was built around memory: my late father, my grandfather, Boonma\u2019s work, and the core community of people who made Dib possible long before the institution existed. It was a somber show that never asked anyone to look away from loss but tried instead to embody what it means to experience loss. In essence, it was an ode to spiritual reconciliation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGiving Life,\u201d our second exhibition, will mark the moment we finally allow ourselves to celebrate again. Featuring around 30 artists, including Alexander Calder, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Izumi Kato, the show explores the many ways artists breathe new life into materials, objects, and ideas. What fascinates me most is how some begin with things that already carry their own histories: spent bomb shells, living plants, old machinery. Objects shaped by conflict, time, or everyday use are transformed into something unexpectedly alive. Many of these works were made while their countries were at war, their economies were collapsing, or authoritarian governments were tightening their grip on the freedoms that make life feel like your own person. Yet together they make a quiet but unmistakable case for life itself. That feels worth celebrating. Perhaps this abundance of life is my own response to the undiagnosed malaise I carried home from art fairs. Whatever it is, it already seems to be working.<\/p>\n

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\"Composite<\/div>\n<\/div>
Left, Miwako Tezuka, director of Dib Bangkok, with Osathanugrah. Top, Anselm Kiefer\u2019s The Lost Letter<\/em>, 2019, and above, view of the museum\u2019s exterior, showing a cone-shaped gallery space called the Chapel.<\/span>Courtesy Dib Bangkok (3); Kiefer: Photo Auntika Ounjittichai; Dib Bangkok: Photo W Workspace<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Away from museums, the market <\/strong>has continued its own reckoning over the past year. The top of the auction world and the prices for historical artists kept climbing while blue-chip, middle-market names looked shakier: a natural cycle, it seems to me. In other news, and to my joy, Ren\u00e9 Magritte deservedly became one of the market\u2019s most sought-after names, proof that quality paired with scarcity only boosts appetite. This past June, Sotheby\u2019s London sold La Belle Promenade<\/em> (1965) for $21.6 million, while the house\u2019s Paris branch sold La Magie Noire<\/em> (1934) for $12.3 million in October 2025.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe subtle painterly quality that draws me to Magritte also brings me much closer to home, to the paintings of Prae Pupityastaporn, whose work I have collected for almost a decade. A visit in early June to Sutima Sucharitakul\u2019s Nova Contemporary in Bangkok\u2019s Samyan-Rama4 area deepened my appreciation of her work. Pupityastaporn takes ordinary subjects\u2014a window or a landscape, for example\u2014and suspends them in a real yet eerie, quietly humming dreamscape, softer and more interior than Magritte\u2019s. There is a silent magic within the mundanity in her work that reminds me that within our everyday lives there is actually something quite sublime. It\u2019s this quality that makes her one of Thailand\u2019s most exciting and unique painters.<\/p>\n

\n\tRight now, there is a generational story unfurling. The children of collectors (myself excluded, having apparently missed the rebellious gene) do not always wish to inherit their parents\u2019 taste, and I understand the instinct, even if I never quite felt it myself. Someone actually complained to me not long ago that their parents had bought a Monet. I digress. Yes, it\u2019s hard to watch, though I suspect what\u2019s really at stake has less to do with taste than with the relationship between parent and child, playing itself out through whatever does or doesn\u2019t end up on the walls at home.<\/p>\n

\n\tNonetheless, I\u2019ve been feeling unusually optimistic about Thailand this year. It seems to me that a newer style of gallery, built more around community and vibe, is answering that gap. It feels like its own coming-of-age story is still being written. Bangkok Kunsthalle, for example, continues to push forward in Yaowarat; the Jim Thompson Art Center is still building on the momentum Gridthiya (Jeab) Gaweewong created there; and Central Group\u2019s deCentral, led by my old schoolmate Punn Chirakiti, opens next year. Moreover, there seems to be a growing wave of new collectors and patrons entering Bangkok\u2019s cultural scene. Together, they\u2019ve kept me far more entertained close to home than any frog in the bustle of an art fair ever managed. None of it is mine to take credit for, which is perhaps why it has been such a pleasure simply to watch it unfold.<\/p>\n

\n\tBeing grounded at home, as it turned out, wasn\u2019t so bad. It gave me an excuse to sit still and reflect. Collecting has taught me a great deal over the years. Going back to Gander\u2019s frog, I\u2019m reminded that art is not something we are necessarily meant to fully understand. The works that remain with us are rarely the ones we can completely explain. They are the ones that change how we see the world and, every so often, remind us how to see it at all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Collectors_Diary_Ver1.jpg?w=1024″] I hadn\u2019t expected a talking frog to remind me of why I fell in love with contemporary art, and I certainly hadn\u2019t expected to lose it before I ever had the chance to buy it. In March, during a stretch of cool weather that reminds me why I still love Hong Kong, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2202251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2202251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2202251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2202251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2202251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}