The Entrepreneurs Live in Shanghai: Museum of the future

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Entrepreneurs Live in Shanghai – Museum of the Future

Podcast: The Entrepreneurs (Monocle Radio)
Episode: The Entrepreneurs Live in Shanghai: Museum of the Future
Date: May 13, 2026
Host: Tom Edwards
Guests:

• Colin Chinnery – Co-founder, Sound Art Museum, Beijing
• Purat Osuthanakra – Founding Chairman, DIB Bangkok

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Overview

Recorded live at Monocle’s inaugural Entrepreneurs conference in Shanghai, this episode explores the modern museum’s evolving mandate as a space for cultural expression and public engagement. Featuring the visionary leaders behind two pioneering institutions—Beijing’s Sound Art Museum and DIB, Bangkok’s first international-scale contemporary art museum—the discussion delves into redefining what museums can be, the drive to preserve and innovate, and the intersection of private passion, heritage, and public responsibility.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Backstories: Building New Institutions

• Purat Osuthanakra shares his journey from family business and finance to founding DIB Bangkok, Thailand’s first contemporary art museum of international scale. His motivations stem from an artistic family legacy and a desire to provide Bangkok with a vital civic institution previously missing in Thai society.

  "Bangkok's never had Tate Modern like London... nor do we have MoMA like New York. I constantly ask myself why our countries, for better or worse, it hasn't been like an essential civic institution." (03:15)

• Colin Chinnery recounts the genesis of the Sound Art Museum and China’s unique relationship to sound, broadening the notion of “sound art” beyond Western conceptions to encompass all creative uses of sound in life and culture.

  "We're a museum that focuses on sound and the world's only museum that focuses on sound. In terms of physical institutions... it's really, really strange, like why sound is such a huge part of our lives and how come there's no institution that is dedicated to that particular medium?" (04:45)

2. Collection, Curation & Representation

• On Curation Strategy:

  • DIB’s collection is born from passion, not prescriptive checklists. Purat describes an inclusive vision, blending Thai and international artists (from Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami to Thai greats like Montien Bunma).

    “Everything starts from the heart. Everything speaks to us first before we collect.” (10:38)
    “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...” (12:25)

• On Sound as Art and Heritage:

  • Colin discusses preserving endangered sounds—like Beijing’s “spooky pigeons” with intricate whistles and the melodies of street hawkers—and providing immersive, informational experiences that go beyond traditional object-based museums.

    “What's the point of showing me a musical instrument if you can't tell me the whole purpose of its existence, which is its sound?” (19:30)

3. Notable Quotes & Moments

Purat Osuthanakra:

• On the role of a contemporary art museum in urban life:

  “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.” (03:58)

• On lowering barriers to art appreciation:

  “Sometimes people look at art and go, what the heck is that?” (12:24)
  “Our job... 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.” (12:25)

Colin Chinnery:

• On documenting disappearing traditions:

  “Beijing culture is very sound centric... these huge gaps when it comes to sound. It's as if everybody’s kind of filtered sound out.” (08:45)

• On museum experience:

  “You have all these instruments in vitrines and you can't hear what they sound like. ...What’s the point of showing me a musical instrument if you can’t tell me the whole purpose of its existence?” (19:22)

• On reviving extinct languages:

  “We worked with scholars around the world to bring them back to life, to bring the sound back to life... it's a little bit like [reconstructing] dinosaur bones, but with languages.” (23:34)

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Sound Demonstrations & Stories (with Timestamps)

• Beijing’s Spooky Pigeons & Street Hawkers
  • [07:21] – Auditory tradition of pigeons with whistles and unique street vendor melodies; now endangered but uniquely evocative of “Old Beijing.”
  • Quote: “Only people in Beijing would think of putting whistles onto the backs of pigeons...” (07:40)
• Nature Soundscapes
  • [13:28] – Scottish bird mating rituals, recorded in collaboration with Chris Watson (David Attenborough’s sound man).
  • Quote: “Chris Watson is one of the best sound recorders of nature in the world... we have a long-term collaboration with Chris Watson to do our sounds of nature.” (13:50)
• Inner Mongolia Heroic Epic
  • [19:02] – Revival of a lost oral tradition, now performed and exhibited in Beijing, with interactive, multisensory museum approaches.
  • Quote: “Each light, they have one light for one instrument. And whichever instrument is illuminated, you hear the music played of that instrument... So our museum is... an immersive experience.” (19:30)
• Reconstructing Extinct Languages
  • [22:49] – Sogdian, a thousand-year-extinct language, is sonically resurrected with the help of global scholars and the British Library.
  • Quote: “It's a language that's been extinct for over a thousand years... We worked with scholars around the world to bring them back to life, to bring the sound back to life.” (23:06)

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Audience Q&A Highlights (from 24:33)

• Q: If you could showcase any sound or artwork to draw crowds, what would it be?
  • Purat: Experience is about curation for emotional connection—exhibits must resonate.
    • Cites a participatory sound installation (“art wall” you hit with a bat, ringing out at 120 decibels):

      "Not only will you be unearthing what's behind the wall... but there's a system of microphones and loudspeakers which amplifies your hit to 120 decibels and announces your arrival." (25:07)

  • Colin: For sound, it’s about crafting a compelling narrative, not a single artifact.

    “For us, it's not about one artwork. It has to be about the story... We have to really invent that for ourselves and find out what audiences love along the way.” (26:36)

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Reflections on Modern Museums

• Holistic Artistic Experience:
  Both guests stress dissolving boundaries between artistic disciplines—sound, visual, architecture, design, and even culinary arts—for more immersive, emotionally engaging, and inclusive public spaces.

  “The arts in general... it's about creative expression and being an artist you can express in so many mediums. But... we only have a few senses—sight, sound, touch. Contemporary art and sound, it's the nexus of it all.” (Purat, 17:00)

• Evolving with Technology and Society:
  Museums must address the challenges of AI, digitality, and shifting urban cultures, continually redefining what and why they do what they do.

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Memorable Moments

• Playful rapport: Banter about art being a “gateway drug,” sound collection logistics, and even jokes about resurrecting extinct languages (“If anyone [knows Sogdian], they’re really showing their age.” – Colin, 22:49)
• Personal touch: Purat’s closing guitar performance on stage, underscoring a lifelong passion for music and art.

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Key Timestamps

• [01:36] – Purat Osuthanakra: Introduction, family and business background
• [04:38] – Colin Chinnery: Introduction, founding the Sound Art Museum
• [07:21] – Beijing’s "spooky pigeons" and street hawkers (sound sample)
• [10:11] – DIB’s curation philosophy
• [13:28] – Scottish nature sound example (Chris Watson collaboration)
• [19:02] – Inner Mongolian heroic epic, multisensory display
• [22:49] – Extinct Sogdian language, reconstructing lost sounds
• [24:33] – Audience Q&A: What would you showcase for maximum impact?
• [28:56] – Purat closes with a guitar performance

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Conclusion

This special live episode showcases how new-generation museums—driven by entrepreneurial zeal, personal narrative, and cultural mission—are expanding the boundaries of art and sound, creating vibrant, participatory spaces for all. Both DIB Bangkok and Beijing’s Sound Art Museum demonstrate that to build the museum of the future, one must blend history, technology, emotion, and story into an experience that is as diverse and dynamic as its audience.

For more, visit soundartmuseum.org and dibbangkok.org.

Transcript

[Tom Edwards]

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 program 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 Osuthanakra 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. This is the Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards,

Colin Chang, a warm welcome to this special edition of the program.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

Afternoon.

[Tom Edwards]

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 DIB Bangkok, this amazing institution that you lead.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

Of course. Thank you, Tom. Thanks Monico, 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, this event is 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. So I always, my heart was always there and it's sort of been a multi generational trap. My family, in a way, we came 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 of the funds come back to education and art. Besides DIP 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 Tate Modern like London has, nor do we have moma like New York. You know, I constantly ask myself why our countries, 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. 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 awesome contemporary art museum now too.

[Tom Edwards]

And it's incredible. And I think it's the most anticipated opening pan regionally probably since M 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.

[Colin Chinnery]

Sound Art Museum. The name sometimes confuses people because sound art makes people think of very niche, very peripheral part of contemporary art, which is artists working, contemporary artists working with sound, and 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. 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. So I've been working with sound for a few years. I'm actually. My background is predominantly as a contemporary art curator in China, similarly to Thailand. Contemporary art, contemporary culture is not, let's say, mainstream part of everybody's lives. And so I actually helped to create China's first major international Contemporary Art Center, UCCA, back in 2000. 7. 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 realized that on one hand, contemporary culture remained very peripheral and therefore working contemporary art scene. One thing that was frustrating was that I was always like, I was preaching to the converted all the time, always speaking as if to our own community. 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.

[Tom Edwards]

Well, and what's exciting today is we're going to actually play you some of the sounds that Colin mentions. He's teeded up nicely these old Beijing sounds. Ready, Sound crew, fire off the first sound we're going to hear.

[Colin Chinnery]

So I think, Andrew.

[Tom Edwards]

Yes, we've got another. We've got another.

[Colin Chinnery]

Colin. Hang on.

[Tom Edwards]

Colin, tell me what, what do we just experience?

[Purat Osuthanakra]

What, what was he saying?

[Colin 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 like every continent of the world. But only people in Beijing would think of putting whistles onto the backs of pigeons. So these very intricately pigmented produced their 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. 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 still hear it a lot. 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 mei or Lao Beijing Yaohe street hawkers before 1949, before 1950s, when private enterprise and you have people like 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 specialist century Beijing. So it became a major culture. And yet again, even though 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.

[Tom Edwards]

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 and his lifetime of collecting. What's on the agenda when it comes to the programming and what we see at digi? Is it about an equality of expression with Thai and other regional and then also international artists? Tell us about it.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

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 are all collectors of something in some way, shape or form. We have Spotify now, but before 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. What's definitely one of the ways we decorate space and our collection, since it is a private museum, 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 DIP Bangkok, one of the balancing acts for me is having built this museum from scratch. It's no longer just about me. It's no longer about what the family likes. Yeah, we have our passions and we collect artists from Louis Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and the best greats of Thai artists as well, Montien Bunma, which we consider the founding father of Thai contemporary art. We have a few Picassos as well.

[Colin Chinnery]

Sure.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

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?

[Tom Edwards]

That's good.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

Like Marcel Duchamp. I don't know if you've seen a urinal in a gallery before, not in the toilet. But a lot of art experts consider that great art. I'm a fan of Duchamp, but for me, I feel going into a museum can be sometimes quite off putting. 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 Dip Bangkok, I'd like to think of art like an ocean. If you're very experienced, you're going to scuba dive in a deep dive, 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 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. But once you do, it's.

[Tom Edwards]

I love that. I can ask you a bit more about the mechanics of how you gather sound.

Column.

Let's actually set that up with second of our special sounds. Guys, hit play. Colin, what are we hearing?

[Colin Chinnery]

Well, obviously it's not this guy making the sounds. It is Chris Watson who actually recorded the sounds itself. 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.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

Was that a sound of a tree?

[Matthias]

No.

[Colin Chinnery]

The sound of a bird? Yeah, it was a bird mating ritual.

[Tom Edwards]

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. Presumably Colin sometimes has a sensitivity around, oh, who's this guy coming along? Kind of stick it, stick it in. 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.

[Colin Chinnery]

Well, actually most. I mean, what you're talking about is mostly field recording and I have done field recording before and we do work with field recorders, but field recording is a quite, what 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.

[Tom Edwards]

That's what I.

[Colin Chinnery]

Or in a bird's face.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

Only bird mating. Only birds.

[Colin Chinnery]

Yeah, yeah. We do it discreetly, without its knowledge, while it's mating. Sorry, get that image out of your mic. 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, 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, 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 as a massive five year project, 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.

[Tom Edwards]

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 psycho?

[Purat Osuthanakra]

Yeah, I think everything is sort of converging now. I'd like to think of arts as these, the arts in general, right. There's architecture, design, even culinary arts. It's, 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, you know, I love talking to Colin is we only have a few senses and you know, 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. So the. 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.

[Tom Edwards]

Let's snap our audience out of their mundanity right now. Let's play our third sound. Well, it's a beautiful sound. Colin, tell us more about this one.

[Colin Chinnery]

So this is a Korchin heroic epic. And this was a tradition that Inner Mongolia had completely died out. It had disappeared. And a scholar called Buttolt, Professor Butolt, 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. 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 a 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 is 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. 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 got the information like a museum museological, but you also have an immersive experience.

[Tom Edwards]

And You've done such a great job, I think, at realizing 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 Div. Bangkok also. It was a long held dream, one 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? Is it about, I don't know, formulating a new one?

[Purat Osuthanakra]

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, brilliant Thai architect, was Tadao Ando's protege. Actually his name's Coolapat 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 Tadao 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. But we want to just have people. When you come to dip, slow down a little bit. Dip. In 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.

[Tom Edwards]

An amazing story and it's got an amazing. James Turrell. I know the blueprints that I believe your father acquired some time ago. One of my, one of my all time favorites.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Edwards]

Amazing stuff.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

You have to check it out.

[Tom Edwards]

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. Let's check out.

[Colin Chinnery]

All right, go on, Colin. You know, hands up if anyone in the audience understands that it's literally a language that's been extinct for over a thousand years. So if anyone put their hand, they're really showing their age.

[Tom Edwards]

Slightly unfair question. Good effort.

[Colin Chinnery]

So, yeah, so Sogdian is a language and what we did was we did an exhibition of basically we reformed re we reinstated. What's the word? I don't speak English enough now, basically. Yeah. We redid the sounds of these extinct languages of Central Asia.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

I imagine it's like imagining you Know, you get the bones of a dinosaur and you have to imagine with the T. Rex.

[Colin Chinnery]

Yeah, it's a little bit like that, but with languages. So these languages have been extinct for over a thousand years, and we work with scholars around the world to bring them back to life, to bring the sound back to life. And we worked with the British Library. The show that you see behind me is at the British Library. It's a show about Dunhuang, which is a famous oasis in China and is about daily life in this famous oasis. And this letter that you hear, this is actually this manuscript here, is a letter by a Saudian woman in the 4th century AD to her husband who has deserted her. And she's basically saying, I'd rather be married to a pig or a dog than to you. It sounds very poetic, but actually that's literally what she's saying.

[Tom Edwards]

I think I knew somebody like that one. Listen, time is up against us, so I'm sure you must have questions for these two incredible founders. Let's have a look in the center here. The light's a little bright. Rheima San.

[Matthias]

Hello, Matthias from Germany, now living in Nanjing. Question to both of you. If you could choose any kind of piece of art or any kind of sound to showcase in your museums for a certain amount of time to attract as much possible visitors that you want to have as you can, what would you choose and why?

[Tom Edwards]

That's a good one. Go on, Colin. Do you want Chinese? What would it be?

[Purat Osuthanakra]

The fantasy of as many visitors as possible.

[Tom Edwards]

What about just what you would have?

[Purat Osuthanakra]

I think if you go to most museums, they'll probably Show Anywhere between 100 to a couple hundred, maybe 1,000 pieces of art. But at the end of the day, when you leave that museum, you're probably going to only remember two to three. So what we try to do is, whilst retaining the curatorial narrative and integrity and all that, we try to curate in a way that we think about our demographic and audience so that there's something for everyone. For example, our first show, which is still on, by the way, until July, the first thing you would see when you walk into the main building is this work of art that actually got a very strong sound element. It's an art wall. It just looks like a normal art wall, but there's a giant baseball bat attached to it, chained to it. And your job as the audience is to hit the wall in any way you like, as hard as you like. And when you do, not only will you be unearthing what's behind the Wall, which is kind of layers of paint, but there's a system of microphones and loudspeakers which amplifies Your hit to 120 decibels and announces your arrival. And it's just this guttural, really physical thing you would never get to do do in your everyday life. Anyone can enjoy it. Kids 8 and above all, the way to 80 will. You know how often you get to do that and build a piece of art at the same time?

[Tom Edwards]

Let the under eight have a bash as well, surely.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

No, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. It's. It's.

[Colin Chinnery]

Yeah, that could work in the standard, actually. I had my eye or ear on that work for a long time. But we don't really have the space to display, unfortunately. But for us, it's not about one artwork. It's never about one piece. It has to be about the story. Especially working with sound. The sound is not like artworks. We have an amazing artifact from, you know, 3,000 years ago, or you have, you know, the world's most famous Picasso or whatever that is in the public consciousness. You don't have that with sound. So what you do with sound is very, very different. You have a different mentality when exhibiting sound in that you tell a story. You have to have a narrative around the whole thing. So that is an ongoing process of finding those narratives and finding different ways of exhibiting sound. Because as we're the first institution in the world to do it, there are no real precedents for us to learn from. We have to really invent that for ourselves and find out what audiences love along the way.

[Tom Edwards]

That was Colin Chinnery and Purat Chang Ostatanakraw talking to me in Shanghai. My thanks to them for joining this special edition of the program, which was recorded in front of a live audience at the Jing' An Shangri La in Shanghai. To find out more about Colin and Chang's respective ventures, head on over to soundartmuseum.org and to dibbangkok.org. And that's all for this special edition of the show. We'll be back to our regular programming at the same time next week, but to round off the show, here is Chang once again, this time playing us out on stage in Shanghai on his guitar. The program's produced by Laura Kramer with editing by Jack Dewars. Our Shanghai production manager was David Stevens, with support from Ryuma Takashi. You can listen again and find out more about the [e-mail] and if you want to get in touch, email laura on lrkonical.com I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to the entrepreneurs.

[Purat Osuthanakra]

SA.