The Labyrinth#2

Location: Saphan Hin Public Park Phuket
Project Type: Art Installation for Thailand Biennale 2025 Phuket
Size: 7m2
Completion: 2025
Designer: Pitupong Chaowakul
Photograph: Supermachine Studio

Sponsor: Phuket Merlin

The Labyrinth#2 is a permanent public installation situated among the casuarina trees of Saphan Hin coastal park in Phuket, commissioned for the Thailand Biennale 2025. Monumental in scale yet entirely open to the eye, the structure makes itself known through an uncompromising red — but offers no wall, no barrier, and no surface that cannot be seen through.

The work takes the form of a cube built from layered steel grids: open lattice planes stacked and crossed into a red steel lattice without a clear path. Visitors enter from any side and discover the structure's central proposition — that every route offers a partial view of someone else navigating the same space. A figure glimpsed through three planes of red. A silhouette disappearing around a corner that wasn't there a moment ago. The Labyrinth#2 does not hide by concealing. It hides by multiplying.

At its core is a belief in physical presence — that people should meet in person rather than catching up through a screen. Hide and seek, the oldest game, becomes the most direct argument for being in the same place at the same time. The structure holds both impulses — hiding and finding — simultaneously, and between its red lines, isolation and togetherness become the same condition, experienced from a different angle of the same grid.

The work deliberately resists a single category. It is an artwork, but also something you can walk into, sit inside, and use as a meeting point. It is public furniture as much as it is sculpture — and that ambiguity is intentional. The aim was always to make something that belongs to the park rather than sitting apart from it.

This is the second iteration of an ongoing investigation. In 2014, The Labyrinth#1 was built in Bangsaen, Chonburi — a cast concrete structure in a public park on the Gulf of Thailand coast, exploring the same central tension through entirely different means. That work was recognised with the AR Emerging Architecture Award from the Architectural Review, London. The Labyrinth#2 returns to the public park as a site, to the coast as a setting, and to the maze as a social form — this time in steel, transparent, and permanently red.

Saphan Hin is reclaimed land. Beneath the park lies decades of landfill — the accumulated waste of Phuket's relentless tourism industry, buried and built over. Yet the park itself is stubbornly, beautifully ordinary. No manicured gardens, no entry fee, no programme. Just trees, a coastline, and whoever happens to show up. It is exactly the kind of place that cities keep accidentally making right — a space for normal people doing normal things, with nowhere particular to be. Within that context, The Labyrinth#2 is not an interruption but a continuation: something vivid placed inside something modest, inviting a different kind of attention to both.

The Labyrinth#2 is a permanent public artwork, commissioned for the Thailand Biennale, Phuket 2025, and funded by Phuket Merlin.

  • Circulations