Ex-Hong Kong gallerist buys Thai forest for ‘healing’ art project
Created by Marisa Chearavanont, wife of CP Group’s chairman, the Khao Yai Art Forest includes works by Louise Bourgeois and Richard Long
In 1999, the late French artist Louise Bourgeois unleashed her Maman, one of the most recognised and fearful symbols of motherly love in art.
The metal sculpture of a female spider nine metres (30 feet) tall was a tribute to her own mother – a tapestry restorer who died young and who, in the artist’s mind, had an arachnidan knack for patching what was broken.
Today, a bronze version of Maman, on loan from the artist’s Easton Foundation, sits above a paddy field just outside Thailand’s Khao Yai National Park.
The park, Thailand’s oldest protected reserve, is a place many people visit to escape the smog in Bangkok – about three hours away by car – and reality.
Visitors on their way to the park might pass the nearby Toscana Valley – an Italian-themed resort with a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and, even more bizarrely, Wild West ranches filled with Thai cowboys and country music.
But the newly opened Khao Yai Art Forest, where Bourgeois’ spider looms, is far less exotic. According to its founder, it is a sanctuary where land will be restored to its natural state and where art and organic food can inspire visitors at a time of destructiveness and divisiveness.