From Display to Appointment: The Limits of Access

From the sealed storefront of Prada Marfa to the occasional opening of K-Bar, Elmgreen & Dragset give exclusion different architectural forms. Their forest pavilion introduces a particular tension: the bar genuinely functions, yet most visitors encounter its hospitality only as a possibility behind glass.

The drive from Bangkok to Khao Yai Art Forest takes about four hours. The city gives way to suburbs, the suburbs to rice fields, and the rice fields to forest. Covering around 85 hectares, the site was acquired by its current operators in 2022 and promotes itself as a place of “healing.” Art, farmland, and forest meet here, but a visit still requires planning: opening days, shuttle services, dining packages, and the schedules of individual works all affect where you can go and how long you can stay. Even those exploring on foot generally follow designated routes. The forest changes the setting in which art is encountered, but the rules governing a visit remain. At the entrance to K-Bar, those rules become particularly tangible.

K-Bar is a charcoal-grey square pavilion tucked away at the end of a grassy path. Its dark exterior looks slightly out of place amid the greenery. Through the glass, however, you can see a fully furnished bar: a counter made of steel and dark wood, red leather seats, a terrazzo floor, an entire backlit wall of bottles, and a 1996 oil painting by Martin Kippenberger. It serves real drinks to real guests, but rarely opens. Once a month, usually on the second Saturday, it operates for six hours, admitting just six guests at a time by separate reservation. On those evenings, staff lead guests through the grounds towards a small pool of warm yellow light. Most of the time, visitors can only look through the glass at the counter, the bottles, and the painting. They never see a drink being poured.

Spaces whose purposes are immediately recognisable but whose use is obstructed are familiar territory for Elmgreen & Dragset. Since 1997, the duo have created a series of architectural and functional interventions under the title Powerless Structures. Their 1998 work Queer Bar rearranged a bar counter, beer taps, and seating into a closed oval, with the stools enclosed inside, beyond visitors’ reach. In 2018, they produced an enlarged version for Perrotin in Paris. Discussing the work, the artists have spoken about the encounters bars once made possible: before social media changed how people met, these were places to find friends or lovers. Such spaces were becoming scarce.

Against this background, the empty seats in Queer Bar amount to more than a spatial joke. Someone should be sitting there, ordering a drink, trying to start a conversation with the person next to them. The work prevents any of this from happening. K-Bar is different: it retains the possibility of actual use. Guests can sit down, drinks can be consumed, and conversations can last for hours. But before anyone meets, the date, the number of people, and the terms of entry have already been settled. What might otherwise have been a spontaneous drink becomes an activity booked as part of a trip.

K-Bar’s drinks menu was developed with the team behind Bangkok’s Ku Bar. Tucked away on the third floor of a former printing house on Phra Sumen Road in the old town, Ku Bar has dim lighting, an understated entrance, and a menu that changes with local ingredients. The collaboration brings practical bartending experience into K-Bar: how to balance acidity and aroma, work with seasonal produce, and make a drink worth ordering again. What happens behind the counter has a concrete source in an operating bar; it does more than make the room look convincing.

Recipes can travel into the forest, but the life that gathers around a city bar is harder to transport. Regulars stop by after work, strangers walk in on impulse, and someone finishes a first drink and decides to stay for a second. These encounters depend on the rhythm of regular opening hours. K-Bar’s occasional sessions can produce a different kind of gathering, but they are unlikely to build the same relationships. The distinction between the two bars is not simply that one is easier to find or enter. It concerns whether people can return often enough for an act of consumption to become a habit within their lives.

The “K” in K-Bar comes from Kippenberger. As a young man, the German artist helped run SO36 in West Berlin, an important venue for punk and underground performance. His work and public persona remained entangled with drinking, socialising, and nightlife. A bar is therefore a tribute with a particular connection to his life. The oil painting hanging here is both an artwork to be viewed and a reminder of the social world another artist once inhabited.

Elmgreen & Dragset have also described the arrival of this European painting in Thailand as a small reversal of the longstanding flow of Southeast Asian art into Western collections. Yet where a work arrives and how people can approach it remain separate questions. Daytime visitors can see the painting through the glass. Those with a reservation can share a room with it, drink and talk beside it, or glance at it again when their attention happens to wander. Both are real ways of looking. The difference is whether the painting is an exhibit behind glass or part of the room you occupy. K-Bar’s opening arrangements preserve that distinction.

Looking through the glass inevitably recalls the duo’s 2005 work Prada Marfa. Located beside US Highway 90 near Valentine, Texas, it resembles a Prada store, with shoes and handbags displayed in its windows. Miuccia Prada authorised the use of the brand name and supplied the merchandise, but the building has never operated as a shop. Passing visitors can stop, approach, and look inside, yet they cannot do what the space appears to invite: enter, browse, try something on, and buy it.

Prada Marfa was originally intended to weather naturally, but events altered that plan. Theft and vandalism following its opening made ongoing repair and protection necessary. The display items were also modified to reduce the risk of theft. A “store” that conducted no business still required someone to look after its windows, walls, and merchandise. The steady stream of tourist photographs subsequently gave it another use. People might come less to examine what was in the window than to photograph themselves standing in front of an image they already knew.

K-Bar does not simply reproduce that permanently closed door. It allows the bar to function at certain moments, changing the question in the process. Visitors to Prada Marfa need not wonder whether they have secured a place: nobody can enter to shop. At K-Bar, they know that someone will eventually sit inside, though it may not be them. This difference shapes the encounter. You see more than a temporarily empty room. You imagine it open, and wonder who will spend an evening there.

Within Khao Yai Art Forest, this dependence on timing and service is hardly exceptional. Transport, meals, and visits have to be coordinated; Fujiko Nakaya’s fog installation also runs at scheduled times. The fog shifts with the wind, temperature, and humidity, so no two appearances are quite alike. Yet it still requires water, equipment, and maintenance staff. Experiencing art in the forest involves both things that cannot be determined in advance and a great deal of work that must happen on time. Where the wind carries the fog and when the installation starts together determine what visitors see.

K-Bar keeps such arrangements in plain sight. Through the glass, everything appears ready; the room seems to need only people to sit down. For the door to open, however, there must be a suitable date, a reservation, and a journey made for the occasion. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about K-Bar is precisely that it can be used. The drinks those six guests consume and the conversations they have do not become false because they take place inside an artwork. For the many others passing by during the day, however, these moments must be supplied by the imagination. The counter and seats are close enough to see clearly, but none of the sounds one expects from a bar reach them.

Elmgreen & Dragset, K-BAR, 2024, mixed media, 395 × 610 × 760 cm, Khao Yai Art Forest. Courtesy of Khao Yai Art. Photography by Krittawat Atthsis and Puttisin Choojesroom

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