Collector’s Diary: Chang Osathanugrah Reflects on What It Means to See Art with Fresh Eyes After Years of Looking

I hadn’t expected a talking frog to remind me of why I fell in love with contemporary art, and I certainly hadn’t 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, even when it no longer feels quite like the place I remember, I came across Ryan Gander’s 2025 sculpture You Complete Me, or I see things you can’t see (A Frog’s Tale) at Esther Schipper’s 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.

What the piece did, before I learned I couldn’t 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’s 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.

As a small consolation, Gander is already in the collection of Dib Bangkok, the private museum that was my father’s lifelong dream and that we opened at the end of 2025, two years after his death. Ahead of the museum’s inauguration, we acquired Gander’s Untouched Idea Machines (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.

This was also one of the least 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.

A Shanghai trip came in late April, ostensibly for a Monocle 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’s collection, including 2nd Light (2006). A part of Chan’s “Seven Lights” 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.

Still, 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.

Watching thousands of first-time visitors move through Dib this year has only confirmed it. Experienced collectors don’t necessarily see more than beginners; we simply know more, and that is not 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?

Sadly, I had to forego the Venice Biennale this year; business kept me in Bangkok. But our director Miwako Tezuka went on Dib’s behalf and came back talking about Lorna Simpson’s exhibition, “Third Person” at Punta della Dogana, one of two Venice exhibition spaces of fellow Top 200 Collector François Pinault. What struck Miwako most was Stacked Stones/Vibrating Cycles (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’s view of art as practice rather than spectacle, gently urging humility over hubris. Hearing about that piece, my FOMO was very real.

Miwako 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’d experienced all year to something our first show had been reaching for. “(In)visible Presence” was built around memory: my late father, my grandfather, Boonma’s 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.

“Giving Life,” 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.

Away from museums, the market 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, René Magritte deservedly became one of the market’s most sought-after names, proof that quality paired with scarcity only boosts appetite. This past June, Sotheby’s London sold La Belle Promenade (1965) for $21.6 million, while the house’s Paris branch sold La Magie Noire (1934) for $12.3 million in October 2025.

The 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’s Nova Contemporary in Bangkok’s Samyan-Rama4 area deepened my appreciation of her work. Pupityastaporn takes ordinary subjects—a window or a landscape, for example—and suspends them in a real yet eerie, quietly humming dreamscape, softer and more interior than Magritte’s. 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’s this quality that makes her one of Thailand’s most exciting and unique painters.

Right 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’ 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’s hard to watch, though I suspect what’s 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’t end up on the walls at home.

Nonetheless, I’ve 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’s 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’s cultural scene. Together, they’ve 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.

Being grounded at home, as it turned out, wasn’t 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’s frog, I’m 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.