On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce the temporal presence of TEMPORARY ART MUSEUM SOI SABAI in Bangkok and beyond. We are also very honoured to have those artists, who we respect, contributing to our permanent collection of the temporary art museum. Is it temporary art? or is it temporary museum? I am not sure. Let's discuss this when we meet. This museum will a short-lived fruit of our excitement through the conversation, exchanging of ideas and gathering. Although the museum will have an ephemeral life and the gathering of artists, art works, audience, accidentally lucky tourists and the locals will be momentary, impression will hopefully last longer in each of us than the physical presence of the museum. If you are in Bangkok, planned or unplanned, during the period, you are in the right place at the right time.

Fumiya Sawa

A couple of years ago, we had an exhibition called ‘my room somehow somewhere’ curated by Fumiya Sawa at graf media gm, Osaka, Japan. Modified version of this ‘my room’ exhibition traveled to Taipei, Taiwan with its new name, ROOM AIR. Later on, Fumiya brought Yoshitomo Nara to graf and this visit led to ‘S.M.L’ at graf media gm, the exhibition which was a collaboration between Yoshitomo Nara and graf. ‘S.M.L.’ exhibition evolved dramatically and ended up becoming a grand project entitled ‘ A to Z’ which will culminate this summer in Hirosaki, Nara's hometown.
One freezing winter day, Fumiya came back from London where he had curated an exhibition of South East Asian artists called ‘Assorted Asian Tigers’ and passionately explained to us how exciting Thai culture was. A few months later, Fumiya and I found ourselves in Thailand for the preparation of the exhibition ‘Welcome to Soi Sabai’ which we held at graf media gm, Osaka in summer 2004. We dreamed that we would one day hold an exhibition in Thailand.
This is a brief abstract from the development of the forthcoming exhibition ‘ Temporary Art Museum Soi Sabai’.
In the meantime, graf media gm has presented such artists as Lieko Shiga, Rie Ito, Toumas Toivonen and Nene Tsuboi – the member of AULA , Kyoichi Tsuzuki and Wisut Ponnimit at our gallery space.
Many of the artists we came across after the ‘my room’ exhibition will come together in Bangkok for ‘ Temporary Art Museum Soi Sabai’. This will be a museum built upon on our highly personal relationships. This museum must be ‘temporary’ yet ‘ Sabai’ like a Thai style massage. I already realize that this ‘temporary’ encounter with people in Thailand won’t just be ‘temporary’… if my past experience is anything to go by.

Hideki Toyoshima (graf media gm)