The Entrepreneurs Live in Shanghai: Museum of the future

0:11Colin Chinnery:Hello and welcome to a very special edition of The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. This programme was recorded in Shanghai on the sidelines of the first edition of The Entrepreneurs Live, Monocle's new conference on building great brands and businesses. Coming up, we're meeting two visionary leaders of two extraordinary institutions. Colin Chinnery is the co-founder of Sound Art Museum in Beijing, and Purat Osithanakraw is the founding chairman of Dib Bangkok. We're going to hear why building a truly modern museum is no longer as simple as designing a beautiful building, and we'll discover how their entrepreneurial zeal has helped to enable the creation of not one, but two future forward museums and spaces for cultural expression.

1:02Colin Chinnery:This is The Entrepreneurs, with me, Tom Edwards.

1:14Colin Chinnery:Colin Chang, a warm welcome to this special edition of the programme. Afternoon. Good to be with you and great to be here. Shanghai, future forward museums. And we want to also talk a little bit about capturing your sort of philosophy on the arts more broadly. But let's start with some intros. Chang, tell us who you are and tell us more about Did Bangkok, this amazing institution that you lead.

1:36Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:Of course. Thank you, Tom. Thanks, Monaco, for having me here. My story in a nutshell and the reason why I'm very happy to be here with you all is when I look out, you know, this event called the Entrepreneurs, we're all building something. We all have a dream. We all have our stories to tell. Yet we're also founders in our own respect. So my story is I spend most of my time actually making the money to actually found Bangkok. So I spend most of my time across private credit, private equity, and having spent time in Singapore as an investment banker. But first and foremost, I consider myself a repressed musician or artist.

2:18Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:So I always, my heart was always there. and it's sort of been a multi-generational trap for my family in a way. We migrated from Southeast China 200 years ago to Thailand. I'm 6th Gen Thai now. And back then we were in pharmaceuticals, pivot to consumer goods. And today I've taken our business to investments, real estate, and all the funds come back to education and art. besides Bangkok, which is Thailand's, I would say, first ever international level and scale museum of contemporary art, which you can all see right behind me. I guess Bangkok's never had a Tate Modern like London has, nor do we have a MoMA like New York.

3:09Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:You know, I constantly ask myself why our country's, for better or worse, it hasn't been like an essential civic institution. So there hasn't been public funding or policy to have a museum. But the reason beyond having this passion for art that I found this museum is about three and a half years ago, my father passed away and a lot of the collection he built. In the latter years of his life, we were building the collection together in order to found this museum because we do view art as this window of reflection into something deeper. It's human expression. It's the most worthy creative endeavor.

3:52Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:And it's not just contemporary art, but it's design, it's architecture. But, you know, just for a city to have a contemporary art museum to reflect on what we consider to be the brightest fruits of human imagination, I think that's worthwhile. and I'll leave with the point that I think Bangkok has too many shopping malls too. If you come down to Bangkok and you don't want to go into our awesome malls, we also have an awesome contemporary art museum now too.

4:22Colin Chinnery:And it's incredible. I think it's the most anticipated opening pan-regionally probably since N Plus in Hong Kong, an amazing space which you should visit. Colin, you're up. Here we are, Sound Art Museum, Beijing. give us the plotted history of this amazing institution. Sound Art Museum, the name sometimes confuses people because sound art makes people think of a very niche, very peripheral part of contemporary art, which is artists working, contemporary artists working with sound. That's sound art. But we're actually based in China, in Beijing. Our audiences are predominantly Chinese, and sound art in China means something completely different.

5:00Colin Chinnery:It means anything creative you do with sound. so actually we're a museum that focuses on sound and the world's only museum that focuses on sound in terms of physical institutions there are many projects that are online that are digital that work with sound and many amazing archives amazing scholars amazing creative people working with sound online and also a lot of sound artists doing projects with sound in various museums around the world but there's only one institution that focuses on sound, and that's us. And it's really, really strange. Like, why? Sound is such a huge part of our lives. And so how come there's no institution that is dedicated to that particular medium is very strange to me.

5:49Colin Chinnery:So I've been working with sound for a few years. My background is predominantly as a contemporary art curator. In China, similarly to Thailand, contemporary art, contemporary culture is not, let's say, a mainstream part of everybody's lives. And so I actually helped to create China's first major international contemporary art centre, UCCA, back in 2007. So things have developed a lot since then in terms of contemporary art institutions. But then I started working with sound. And whenever I was working with sound, I realised that on one hand, And contemporary culture remained very peripheral. And therefore, working contemporary art scene, one thing that was frustrating was that it was always like it was preaching to the converted all the time, always speaking, as if, to our own community.

6:43Colin Chinnery:But when I was working with sounds, I started collecting sounds like traditional Beijing sounds that are very well known, but nobody's actually gone out and done the work to collect it and curate it before. Well, and what's exciting today is we're going to actually play you some of the sounds that Colin mentions. He's teed it up nicely, these old Beijing sounds. Ready, sound crew. Fire off the first sound we're going to hear today.

7:21Colin Chinnery:So I think Andrew, yes. We've got another, we've got another, Colin. Hang on.

7:35Colin Chinnery:Colin, tell me, what did we just experience?

7:38Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:What was he saying?

7:40Colin Chinnery:The first one was what Andrew described as scary pigeons. I would describe them more as spooky. Spooky pigeons. Well, it's an amazing Beijing tradition because you have pigeon keepers, pigeon fanciers all over the world. It's a major culture from every continent of the world. But only people in Beijing would think of putting whistles onto the backs of pigeons. So these very intricately produced, they're really beautiful artworks themselves, and they put them on the backs of pigeons. So as they fly through the air, the wind goes through the whistles, and it makes this chord. So one particular whistle might have 10 or even more tones on it, small whistles on it.

8:25Colin Chinnery:So each one produces a chord. And we have three or five pigeons flying at the same time. You have some of the higher chords, some lower chords, some different kind of, some are made with gourds, some are made with bamboo. You have different sounds. So Beijing culture is very sound-centric, their culture, their traditional culture. And it's a dying out tradition. It's almost unheard of now. But 10 years ago, you could It's still here at Law. The second one was of a street hawker. The street hawking tradition is also in China. Everybody knows what it is. It's called Lao Beijing Jiao Mai or Lao Beijing Yauhe.

9:01Colin Chinnery:Street hawkers before 1950s when private enterprise and you have people selling their wares on the streets. And the way to do that in Beijing is to sing a melody according to what you're selling. and in Beijing those melodies became very complex and quite sophisticated because the level of their clientele there were members of aristocracy and very wealthy people in Beijing especially central Beijing so it became a major culture and yet again even though it's everybody knows what it is nobody's gone out and recorded it so there's lots of these huge gaps when it comes to sound it's as if everybody's kind of filtered sound out and so that's maybe why there isn't a museum of sound until we started one well we'll talk more about your drive to collect and create sounds curate i should say chang let me come back to you though about the i guess the provenance of the collection you'd mentioned working on it with your late father in his lifetime of collecting what's on the agenda when it comes to the programming and what we see at dear is it about an equality of expression with Thai and other regional and then also international artists?

10:10Colin Chinnery:Tell us about it.

10:11Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:Yeah, of course. I don't know if there are any art collectors out in the crowd with us today, but I actually think we all collect. We're all collectors of something in some way, shape or form. We have Spotify now, but before, you know, we were collecting albums and we collected music. We collected fashion. We collected clothes. There's so many expressions of art out there, right? But what we do, we collect from modern to contemporary art. I like to quote this painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, but he said that if music is the way we decorate time, then art is the way we decorate space. That's definitely one of the ways we decorate space.

10:56And our collection, since it is a private museum,

11:01Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:it's built from passion. there's no checklist of sorts when you open an art history book and go yes we need to collect historically or categorically we have some of that too but everything starts from the heart everything speaks to us first before we collect and I guess since founding Deep Bangkok one of the balancing acts for me is having built this museum from scratch it's no longer just about me is no longer about what the family likes. Yeah, we have our passions, and we collect artists from Louis Bourgeois to Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and the best greats of Thai artists as well, Mon Tien Bun Ma, which we consider the founding father of Thai contemporary art.

11:50Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:We have a few Picassos as well, sure, but that's not why we have the museum here. We actually have it so that Thais and visitors can come in and connect with art in our space. So if I'm collecting today, I have my curatorial team, and we might be thinking, look, there's never been a museum like this in Thailand, so how do we become this sort of gateway drug? You know, badly put, but this gateway drug to art, right? Sometimes people look at art and they go, what the heck is that? That's good. Like Marcel Duchamp. I don't know if you've seen a urinal in a gallery before, if not in the toilet, but a lot of art experts consider that great art.

12:34Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:I'm a fan of Duchamp, but for me, I feel going into a museum can be sometimes quite off-putting, right? It can be a little bit daunting for lots of, I guess, emerging art regions, such as Thailand, or more Asian-centric, right? So at Deep Bangkok, I like to think of art like an ocean. if you're very experienced you're going to scuba dive in a deep dive right to the right at the end but there's so many ways to enjoy the water you can fish you can surf paddleboard blah blah blah but um our job now as thailand's first contemporary art institution of its kind is to just get people dipping their toes at the water's edge to go hey i think i want to learn how to swim and once you do it's i love that i can ask you a bit more about the mechanics

13:26Colin Chinnery:of how you gather a sound calling let's actually set that up with the second of our special sounds guys hit play

13:47Colin Chinnery:colin what are we are we hearing Well, obviously it's not this guy making the sounds. It is Chris Watson who actually recorded the sound. It's a particular Scottish bird. I'm from Scotland. So it's a bird native to my homeland. And Chris Watson is one of the best sound recorders of nature in the world. He, for all of those people who watch and love David Attenborough nature programs, and I'm sure many of you do, and Chris Watson is the person who has been doing most of that sound recording for his documentaries over the past 30 plus years. So we have a long-term collaboration with Chris Watson to do our sounds of nature.

14:32Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:Was that a sound of a tree?

14:34Colin Chinnery:No, the sound of a bird. Oh, okay. It was a bird mating ritual. And just tell me, because I imagine particularly you do so much of your work is in documenting the sounds of cities, the sounds of communities. You can be, Colin, sometimes there's a sensitivity around, oh, who's this guy coming along, kind of sticking a microphone in while I'm trying to go about my business. How do you balance your natural curiosity and the need to gather all this sound with questions about privacy or being in the right place at the right time? Well, actually, most, I mean, what you're talking about is mostly field recording.

15:11Colin Chinnery:and I have done field recording before and we do work with field recorders but field recording is a quite, what do you call a peripheral, quite a niche it's not really meant for a mass audience or larger audience, what we do is, as a platform is a museum, it's a public museum mostly we don't do that we don't stick a microphone in people's faces we or in a bird's face only bird mating rituals we do it discreetly without its knowledge while it's mating. Sorry. Get that image out of your mind. Just solve it. So a lot of... We are a platform. So like any other museum platform, we don't do all the collecting ourselves.

15:52Colin Chinnery:We don't do all the curating ourselves. We work with many experts like Chris Watson around the world on respective fields. And so we collect a lot of nature recording. Internationally, we work with Chris Watson. But in China, we are creating China's first ever database of natural sounds with the China Academy of Sciences. It's a massive five-year project. It's very expensive. And so they delegate, basically, we're working with 50, actually 50-plus scientific and educational institutions to do that sound recording. And it's all over China. It's a huge project. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.

16:32Colin Chinnery:I think it does. Chang, tell me, we spoke a couple of weeks ago and you talked about how you're interested in discussing the arts in a more holistic way. Tell me a bit about, I don't know, your, I guess, the sort of the philosophy of that and how you, I don't know, engage with your cultural life. What's the role of sound and music? I know you're a keen musician as well. Is it important to look at these things in a more holistic way and not to silo things between visual arts and sound arts?

17:00Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:Yeah, I think everything is sort of converging now. I'd like to think of arts as the arts in general, right? There's architecture, design, even culinary arts. It's the finer things. It's about creative expression. And being an artist, you can express in so many mediums. But you know what? At the end of the day, another reason why I love talking to Colin is we only have a few senses. And sight, sound, touch, all of that. But contemporary art and sound, it's the nexus of it all. It's where it all comes together today. Let's say you go back, what, 200 years ago? There wasn't even any photography yet.

17:41Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:So the function of an artist was actually to capture or depict life as accurately as possible. And throughout the ages, we've kept on disrupting ourselves. And every time we do, we ask a fundamental question of what and why, what is art and why does it exist? And in our day and age now, even especially with AI coming around you know can replicate and do what musicians do within the blink of an eye or even like render images within you know in the painterly quality and all of that it's something we constantly ask ourselves but to me art is always the most supposed to make you feel something it's supposed to make us you know snap us out of our everyday normal rituals mundanity and all of that.

18:33Colin Chinnery:Let's snap our audience out of their mundanity right now. Let's play our third sound.

18:59Colin Chinnery:That was a beautiful sound, Colin. Tell us more about this one. So this is a Korchin heroic epic. And this was a tradition that in Mongolia had completely died out. It had disappeared. And a scholar called Botolt, Professor Botolt, he spent 20 years reviving this tradition. It's an amazing story, actually. One of the new practitioners, who's now a master in the art, was just performing in our museum just last week, just this Saturday, actually. So this is the sound of an epic tradition that died out and then was spent 20 years to revive it. So we have a project on this in our museum. You can see the image here.

19:40Colin Chinnery:These are all Inner Mongolian instruments. And one of the things that really always annoyed me when I visited music museums or musical instrument museums around the world is that you have all these instruments in vitrines and you can't hear what they sound like. and it kind of, what's the point of showing me a musical instrument if you can't tell me the whole purpose of its existence, which is the sound, right? And so this kind of display is, all the lights are on now, but what happens is that each light, they have one light for one instrument, and whichever instrument is illuminated, you hear the music played of that instrument, and there's a video on a monitor, there's a video that shows the instrument being played, because how an instrument is played is not always obvious.

20:28Colin Chinnery:You know, it's really, sometimes it's really unusual. And so that's very much part of the information. So our museum is, on one hand, you've got the information, like our museum, museological, but you also have an immersive experience. And you've done such a great job, I think, at realising this sort of dream that you had to bring that more holistic experience to your audience. Chan, let me ask you about this because you described the origin story of Dear Bangkok. Also, it was a long-held dream when you shared with your late father. What does the evolution of that space and the programming, what does that look like once you realize the dream?

21:07Colin Chinnery:Is it about, I don't know, formulating a new one?

21:10Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:The current museum was actually the seventh. Before I finished it, there were six projects before that I know of, actually. So it's always an evolving thing, Creatives change their mind all the time. And you know what? With our museum, we work with this architect, a brilliant Thai architect, was Tadau Ando's protege, actually. His name's Kulapat, and he's everywhere in the world now. He's working on the Louvre in Paris, the Met, and even India's new National Museum. But having trained under Tadau Ando, he has this austere, concrete, very serene type of language, which I really wanted to have in Bangkok, because if you've been to Bangkok, it's a city of hustle and bustle, chaos, and all kinds of sights and sounds and smells.

21:59Purat 'Chang' Osathanugrah:But we want to just have people, when you come to Dib, slow down a little bit. Dib and its first form with this architect was supposed to look vastly different. So it keeps on evolving. At one point, it kind of looked like a mountain range. We've tapered it down to be a little bit more serene. So one can focus on art.

22:20Colin Chinnery:An amazing story. And it's got an amazing James Terrell. I know the blueprints that I believe your father acquired some time ago. One of my all-time favorites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing stuff. You have to check it out. We'll throw it over to questions in just a moment. So get yourselves ready to tee us up, though, Colin. Should we have our fourth and final sound? Let's check out sound.