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What does a city more than 2,500 years old build next? Those who know Suzhou by name would guess at more of the same: calligraphy, tea, a hump-backed bridge over a canal. All of that is still here, and exquisite. But the answer, I found on a recent visit with @jerome_e_travels, is gobsmackingly futuristic, and nowhere I saw says it better than the new @suzhoumoca.

Picture the lang, the covered corridor that walks you from pavilion to pavilion through a Suzhou garden, then picture it shaken out like a sheet over an entire museum. That is what @big_builds (Bjarke Ingels Group) built: pavilions beneath one rippling steel roof, a long pool of water lilies crossed on stepping stones. I kept stepping out and back in, and lost track of which I was doing.

Suzhou’s second new city, if you can imagine such a thing, began rising in the 1990s beside Jinji Lake, and the museum opened there on 30 August with a simple idea: contemporary art should not sit behind a wall. The rooms bear it out, high and open enough that I spent as much time looking up as at the art.

That Picasso is in the opening line-up should surprise no one. He never stopped asking what came next, in paint, in bronze, on copper plate. Here he is on copper: the complete Vollard Suite, a hundred etchings from the 1930s, on walls the colour of fired clay. Look for the faun lifting a sheet from a sleeping woman, tender and slightly wicked. Then Picasso after Picasso: twenty-one artists answering him, among them Hockney, George Condo, Zao Wou-Ki and Zeng Fanzhi, and a turquoise resin Menina by Manolo Valdés that glows like a boiled sweet. To my eye, it is the cleverest idea in the show.

Elsewhere, Chinese contemporary artists meet Suzhou’s long history head-on, and a room of algorithms and light nods to a district that makes AI and biomedicine for a living. Call it bias: I have long thought Chinese artists light years ahead in execution and nerve, and here they have a building large enough to prove it.

See old Suzhou first: the gardens, the tea, the canals. Picasso runs until 8 November. The architecture, thankfully, is on permanent display, and the best view of that roofline? Take the Ferris wheel. taken in Suzhou, China by @tasukon

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3 days ago

What will it take for Thailand to reach high-income status? Is the creative economy part of the answer? And how do we shape our IP and build the pipeline of future creatives, so that the talent we so clearly have has somewhere to go?

These were the questions in the air on Tuesday afternoon at @andazonebangkok, at Creativity as Capital, hosted by @cea.thailand with @netflixth, an official affiliated programme of the IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings. I looked around the room more than once and thought that plenty of the people listening had the know-how to answer them. It was a pleasure to sit among them.

@worldbank’s Denis Medvedev started us off with a line I keep turning over: Thailand’s creativity isn’t what’s missing; the opportunity to take it further is. Andrew Ure of @netflix suggested that when people ask where the next Korea will come from, perhaps they should be thinking about Thailand. Takonkiet Viravan of The One Enterprise put his company’s reach down to Thainess: compassion, empathy, the ability to compromise. Farid Fezoua of @ifc_org was candid that investors want to know who owns the story before the money moves. And Dr Chakrit Pichyangkul of @cea.thailand and Monchanok Tanasanti of @ipthailand spoke about backing our best companies from the ground up, and about valuing IP properly.

Outside the hall, and inside it too, there was such an impressive display of Thai creativity: craft makers, creative agencies, film producers, post-production studios. So much of it now thriving here; it’s something to see.

With a gathering like this in town, it feels even more as though all eyes are on Bangkok. I am curious whether the creative economy, and Thailand’s place in the world, will be shaped by what gets discussed in this city over the next few days. I rather hope so.

With thanks to @jayspencer for letting me tag along. taken in Andaz One Bangkok by @tasukon

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3 days ago

Is this what we call coming full circle? Wilson Commons, the student union at my university in Rochester, New York, was designed by I. M. Pei, the architect of the Louvre pyramid and Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower. Decades on, I was inside his Suzhou Museum with @jerome_e_travels, freshman-year flashbacks and all.

Mine is a small full circle. For Pei, I imagine, the museum was a homecoming of a deeper kind. “China is my root,” he said in 2004. A Chinese American who spent more than half a century making landmarks around the world, he came out of retirement to give one to the city his family came from, where he spent boyhood summers in their Lion Grove Garden. It opened in 2006, when he was 89.

What do you do when the best view belongs to your neighbour? In Suzhou, you borrow it. Jiejing, borrowed scenery, is the designer’s version of leaning over the fence: leave a gap, cut a window, and a tree or pagoda belonging to someone else becomes part of your view. Here a hexagonal window frames one young tree as carefully as a scroll frames a landscape. Grey stone peaks lean against a white wall, and over it the Humble Administrator’s Garden next door lends the museum its trees.

It is by no means large, so the collection comes in small, dazzling doses: a pale jade peach streaked with russet, a pomegranate in honey-amber tucked beside it (long life, many sons); a copper-red vase, deep at the neck and blushing towards the belly, its glaze finely crazed; a Qianlong dish where iron-red dragons ride a sea drawn in hundreds of tiny blue strokes; a turquoise mountain stitched in silk so fine it moves like ink. I last saw this much of Chinese civilisation’s brilliance in the Asian galleries at the Met.

It is free, timed and mobbed, so booking ahead is a must. There is even an I.M. Pei-opoly with a hard hat among the pewter tokens.

Beyond lies the museum’s original home, the Zhongwang Fu, mansion of the Taiping “Loyal King”. In one courtyard, a wisteria has knotted itself around its own trunk. A stele says Wen Zhengming planted it himself; it is reckoned nearly five hundred years old. Wen painted thirty-one views of the garden next door. I’d love to see it in flower. taken in Suzhou Museum by @tasukon

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5 days ago

It’s one thing to wake up inside an ink-wash scroll, as you do at @fshangzhou, with a garden that has seemingly been sitting for its portrait for centuries. It is quite another to dine at @jinsha_restaurant and taste a refinement that runs, like a brushstroke, back to the Song dynasty.

You reach it on foot. A stream, a koi pond, a lawn clipped like velvet, then a 游廊 (yóuláng), a corridor built for strolling that bends just enough to keep the next view a secret. The garden ideal is 曲径通幽, a winding path to somewhere hidden. Shouldn’t every meal begin with a little historical drama?

Flying eaves lift out of the trees: grey tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, a hexagonal window, red lattice doors. These are eleven private rooms, set around a cloud-sea of lotus, its seed heads like watering-can roses. It is West Lake in miniature, the whole lake edited down to a multitude of carefully latticed frames. By the hotel’s account, one of the country’s largest fine-dining Chinese restaurants, and you would never guess. A terrace over the water for sunset.

Chef @yongwang75 has led the kitchen since the hotel opened and kept Jin Sha Michelin-starred four years running, yet at home he cooks his mother’s recipes. “They are simple,” he says, “but full of the taste of home.”

What @jerome_e_travels and I ate: West Lake water shield with snow crab, on ice under a lotus leaf, in season and fully aware of it. A cod soup boiled until milk-white, with black fungus and bean-curd sheet. The crispy chicken, with spicy-salted taro crisps, a rival to any Peking duck. Braised pork belly, glossy as lacquer, an abalone hiding behind it. Sautéed shredded water bamboo, a delightful first for me, so entirely of this place. And mangosteen ice cream.

Jin Sha’s philosophy is simple, and true: “For in the end, the table is where people and place meet.” China has an idiom for being ambushed by a place through its cooking, 莼鲈之思, “longing for water shield and perch”. A third-century official, Zhang Han, is said to have quit his post over it: one soup, one fish, one homesick man. Poets have built careers from less. I’m still longing for the milk-cloud bliss of that cod soup. taken in Four Seasons Hotel Hangzhou at West Lake by @tasukon

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6 days ago

Sonorous.

We think of it as a word for sound: the low, round note of a cello, a bell’s hum lingering in the belfry after the strike. Yet I can think of no more fitting word for standing before the latest series by visual artist @treyhurst.art. In paint, it becomes depth that carries, tone that keeps resonating after you have turned away. I hear these paintings as much as I see them.

I came to Trey, as many of you might have, through Instagram, where he lets us watch the work being made. I have followed along with a diligence I will charitably call attentive. I love an artist who opens the studio door; seeing craft at work is one of the digital age’s real gifts. Meeting him recently, I found the word fits the man too: unhurried, warm, a presence that carries without being raised. But no feed prepares you for the paintings themselves: large canvases, wonderfully so, close to human scale. I stood before them last night at @playarthouse on Song Wat Road.

At the Threshold gathers five bodies of work made between 2023 and 2026: Solemn, The Structure of Memory, Spectre, Lost Lover and Advent. Its introduction describes figures hovering between abstraction and recognition, assembled as memory is, by repetition, pressure and the sediment of earlier layers. What accumulates is “not likeness but feeling”.

Trey works with a sponge brush, and every arch and disc is laid down in fine concentric sweeps, grooves you can follow like the rings of a tree, then veiled and half erased by the next. The trained architect stacks them like colonnades; from elsewhere, they become people, bowed, huddled, gathered. Navy as deep as ink, a crimson that glows like a lit window, gold and ash on raw linen, hung like triptychs, the light seeming to come through the canvas.

I thought, unexpectedly, of Francis Bacon, whose figures also hold memory in the flesh. Where his are torn, Trey’s seem tender to me, joy and pain pressed into the same layer. That is only my reading; Trey invites you to bring your own, and I suspect each painting will find a memory of yours.

No photograph carries that surface. Go and stand in front of them.

Until 8 November, free entry. Congratulations, Trey. taken in PLAY art house by @tasukon

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7 days ago

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8 days ago

Over three decades ago, I walked into the Astor Court at the Met Museum and thought someone had written a poem and then, rather than publish it, built it. Artisans from Suzhou put it up in 1981: a Ming-style courtyard of grey tiles, lattice windows and a Taihu rock with more holes than an Emmental. I remember stepping through the moon gate and feeling as if I'd walked into an ink-wash painting.

Recently, to my pinch-me delight, I woke up inside one. The @fshangzhou at West Lake sits in nine acres of ponds, bamboo and pavilions, its gardens by Bill Bensley drawing on the Song dynasty. It makes no claim to Suzhou; that line back to the Astor Court is mine, thirty-odd years in the making. Mornings meant light through the lattice in stripes, @jerome_e_travels at his desk, and me on the balcony, feet up, with the HTSI back issues I never board a plane without, which for once had competition.

What I couldn’t stop asking: how does a place with a thousand years of poetry written about it still feel like a discovery? I’m probably projecting, but I think the Chinese garden answers it. Ji Cheng’s Yuan Ye, from the 1630s, has a name for the trick: borrowed scenery. You never own a view; you invite it in through a doorway, so everyone feels it’s offered to you alone. West Lake is that idea writ to scale.

Do see Leifeng Pagoda, but then walk round Gushan, the lake’s only natural island. Go under old plane trees, past lotus leaves Yang Wanli saw reaching to the sky in endless green (I’ve tried, and have no better phrase), and on to Broken Bridge, where the White Snake met Xu Xian. Bai Juyi, the poet-governor the causeway is named for, wrote that he could never walk enough along its white sand under green willows, and I’m with him.

And at the end of each day you step back through the moon gate into a scroll painting you can sleep in. Who could ask for more?

The Xiling Seal Society’s motto, 與古為徒, means to keep the ancients as teachers, and China is full of places that are still teaching, waiting for the rest of us to turn up. Go. I can hardly wait to go back, perhaps one late winter, when the plum trees that kept the hermit-poet Lin Bu company on Gushan are in flower. taken in Four Seasons Hotel Hangzhou at West Lake by @tasukon

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8 days ago

The first residences from @upperhouse_global, designed by @fosterandpartners and due in 2030 and 2031, will stand on what City Realty’s Chali Sophonpanich has called “one of the last remaining freehold plots on Wireless Road”, with views across Lumphini and Benjakitti parks. Launches usually lean on a render and a single show flat. @uhresidencesbangkok has built several complete residences across multiple floors of the Upper House Residences Lounge, each furnished and lit as if its owners had just stepped out, along with a soaring arrival hall and relaxed public galleries.

It calls the space a lounge, and I read the word as deliberate: a sales gallery shows you what you could buy, a lounge asks you to sit down. It is a wager that buyers at this level want to feel a home years before there is one to own.

The model, two towers glowing amber-like, windows lit at dusk, comes first. The living room curves with the building and so do its curtains, so the light arrives through linen and settles on a sofa I wanted to sink into. A plaster wall has been combed into long, looping furrows that hold the lamplight.

Our hosts were Hoss Vetry, Managing Director of Swire Hotels, and Thomas Woolsey and Casey Au, Co-Managing Directors of City Dynamic, the joint venture of City Realty and @swireproperties. Hoss describes Upper House as a philosophy of houses, not hotels, each “shaped by its location, design and people”. Thai has never needed that distinction, since baan means house and home at once.

The highlight was dinner, cooked by Chef Steven Tang, who came from @upperhouse_cd, where he leads Mi Xun Teahouse, which holds a Star from @michelinguide and earned Chengdu’s first Green Star. The menu was headed “Welcome to Our House”, and the vegetarian dishes that followed were a glimpse of the hospitality Upper House means to translate into everyday living. It is a house where somebody has already thought about you.

Wireless Road, a street of embassies, has never wanted for prestige. Upper House intends to raise it a further degree, matching the rarity of the plot with a standard of care to suit, and what I walked through suggests it has the detail to do so. taken in Upper House Residences Bangkok by @tasukon

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9 days ago

For many, Hangzhou begins at West Lake. For me it begins a little higher: up through the tea hills, those neat green ripples, and down into a wooded valley gone cool and hushed, faintly scented with incense. I stood beside @jerome_e_travels, wondering where the city had gone.

This is Lingyin. If West Lake is Hangzhou’s postcard, this is the page behind it, written over for nearly seventeen centuries.

Tradition dates it to around 328 CE, when an Indian monk named Huili took the peak before him for a piece of Vulture Peak, where the Buddha taught, and wondered aloud when it had flown here. He stayed, built a temple and named it Lingyin: roughly, “where immortal spirits hide”. In 823 the poet-governor Bai Juyi ranked Lingyin first in Hangzhou, and its Cold Spring Pavilion first at Lingyin. Burned and rebuilt many times, it still draws people up its steps to light incense and make a wish.

Ours was a smaller pilgrimage: good shoes, no agenda, and something old to see, together.

It unfurls like a scroll, hall after hall climbing the hillside, each with eaves that sweep skyward at the corners (飞檐, “flying eaves”), fitting for a place where a mountain is said to have flown in. In the Great Hall, a gilded camphor-wood Buddha, carved in 1956 and billed as China’s largest wooden Buddha, rises almost twenty metres. Elsewhere, look up: a gilded dragon coils at the heart of a spiralling galaxy of gold.

Then leave the halls for the rock. Feilai Feng, “the peak that flew here”, is the very peak of that story: a limestone cliff carved with Buddhas for over a thousand years, said to be south China’s largest such cluster. The Ming essayist Zhang Dai thought any true lover of stones would put on robes of office and bow to it. He also wrote of the chestnuts behind the Cold Spring Pavilion, ripe in early autumn: cherry-sized, honey-amber, scented like a lotus pod.

A useful note: @amanfayun has a back door that leads almost straight to the temple. Pilgrims have been known to walk for days. We strolled out the back and settled into a pot of Longjing, Hangzhou’s Dragon Well tea, with its chestnut-like sweetness. I never found Zhang Dai’s chestnuts. I tasted them in the cup. taken in Lingyin Temple by @tasukon

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10 days ago

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11 days ago

People say you can spot a @cartier from a mile away. After an evening with @cartierwatchcommunity at Echo Lounge, I would go further: you do not need the dial, or the name, or even your glasses. A square, a rectangle, an oval, and you know whose it is long before you can read a word.

I had a thoroughly good time, like a kid in a very fancy toy shop, so let me take you through the ones I got my hands on.

I will start with the Santos. In 1904 Louis Cartier made one for his friend Alberto Santos-Dumont, who had flown his airship around the Eiffel Tower three years earlier and was tired of fumbling for a pocket watch with both hands busy. (Anyone who has tried to check the time while carrying the shopping will sympathise.) The one I tried was zinc grey, the grey of a Paris roof, with no numerals at all and the screws on its bezel in plain view. To my eye they recall the rivets of the Eiffel Tower, only fifteen years old when the first Santos appeared.

The Tank à Guichets was platinum on a burgundy strap, the deep red of theatre velvet. The Tank itself dates from 1917 and was inspired by the Renault tanks Louis Cartier saw at the Front, and the two bars down either side of the dial are said to echo them. The Guichets shows the hour in a small window, which is what its name means, a ticket window, and the original of 1928 did exactly that.

The yellow-gold Tortue chronograph had Roman numerals, a sapphire in the crown and a rounded case named for a tortoise’s shell. It is also a stopwatch, so here is a tortoise built to time the hare, if you remember your Aesop.

The rose-gold Tank Asymétrique takes the whole case and sets it on the slant. Cartier first tried that in 1936, so that the watch would face a driver’s wrist as it rests on the wheel. This one was skeletonised, so you could look straight through the dial to the movement, with a blue sapphire at the crown and the gold a dusky pink.

Later, at the watchmaker’s table, another Santos case lay in pieces, each part set out as carefully as a cook’s mise en place, and I could have watched all night.

With thanks to Cartier for the evening. taken in ECHO Bangkok by @tasukon

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12 days ago

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will probably have heard of @dibbangkok, even if you haven’t yet been: it is the addition to this city I have been happiest about in years, and its second exhibition, Giving Life ชีวิต ชีวา, only more so. The first, (In)visible Presence, was about memory, and Chang Osathanugrah, the founding chairman, described it as a little sombre, a little minimal; this one, he said, is the first time they wanted to celebrate that the museum is alive and here to stay.

I know “art that is alive” sounds like what one says when out of things to say, but then you reach the soaring Chapel, where Calder’s Les Trois Barres hangs, and from its balcony you meet it almost level with your gaze, as with anything living. I stood beneath it with my hand raised, like someone checking for rain, and, without a finger laid on it, it answered to the faintest stir of air from my movement.

Elsewhere, Sutee Kunavichayanont’s white elephant lies on its side and needs your breath: you lend it some through a tube, and it fills, and when you stop it subsides like a soufflé that has lost its nerve. Which is the point: the series is named for a Buddhist breathing meditation, the in-breath birth, the out-breath decay.

But my favourite is among the stillest works here. Upstairs, and again on the courtyard wall, the Iraqi artist @bassimalshaker has The First Sky curving along one side, its meadow-like skyscape aburst in pinks and mossy greens and mango golds, with reds the colour of a plum’s inside, beneath a similarly painted sky made, as church ceilings were, to be seen from below. The curator, Ariana Chaivaranon, told me it began in the stillness that follows a bombing, and the artist himself has said that his paintings are not about the bomb but about being alive afterwards. So lie down on the carpet (there are cushions aplenty), tip your head right back and drift, and I promise the colours begin to breathe.

Ariana said it has become all too easy, and all too cheap, to destroy, and that this show is for the people who make instead; lying under that sky, I knew exactly what she meant.

Giving Life runs until 3 May. I cannot recommend this enough. taken in Dib Bangkok by @tasukon

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13 days ago