Asia's contemporary art tycoon

  Boonchai Bencharongkul became a billionaire telecoms tycoon in Thailand, but art was his true passion. Spending millions of his own money, he's built one of Asia's finest museums, and filled it with Southeast Asia's largest collection of modern art. Like Getty and  Guggenheim, he's leaving behind a fine artistic legacy in Bangkok's Museum of Contemporary Art.

MY GUIDE AT BANGKOK'S MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART is the man who built Southeast Asia’s most ambitious private museum. Boonchai Bencharongkul greets me in a lobby filled with Thai sculpture and delivers captivating insights into each piece as we move upward floor by floor.

  On one wall is a massive battle scene, reminiscent of Napoleonic masterpieces in European museums, except that this has a Ramayana theme. Even more striking are the otherworldly sci-fi landscapes of the little-seen Sompong Adusarabhan. “He’s a jungle guy,” he explains. “He lives like a hermit off the grid near the River Kwai. He never sells or shows any of his paintings.”

  Boonchai’s first passion was art, but he embarked on a 35-year detour in 1977 when his father called him back to Thailand to help with the family business. Meanwhile, he became rich, and that certainly came in handy in fulfilling his vision for a world-class museum. He spent $30 million on the land and construction, and tens of millions more on the art. MOCA, as it’s called, opened in 2012 near the airport, inside a giant white cube. With six stories filled with 856 works, it’s one of the biggest contemporary art museums in Asia.

   “He’s been around the Thai art scene a long time, collecting, being quite involved,” says Andrew J. West, a Bangkok art critic and author. “MOCA is fantastic. The great thing about a private museum like this is that he had the money and made sure the quality is there.”

  Often that means not just collecting art but also commissioning it. Boonchai has sent artists to Europe for inspiration. He’s pushed many to create in different styles or mediums, out of their comfort zones, and cajoled work from recluses such as Sompong. Why? “I like this better than sitting at DTAC in the boardroom,” he says.

  DTAC is Thailand’s second-largest mobile telephone company, behind Thaksin Shinawatra’s AIS. It started in 1989; he, his two brothers and his sister sold most of it in 2005. They still own 11%, and he continues to chair the board. The four also own Benchachinda Holding, which provides broadband services, and he runs Independent News Network (INN, inspired by CNN). But these days he devotes much of his time to the museum. He and his siblings are worth $1.1 billion and ranked No. 25 on our list of Thailand’s richest last month.

  The family prospered along with his father’s decades-long relationship with Motorola, then a high-tech leader in the U.S. Yet you don’t see displays of technology at headquarters in Benchachinda Towers, the twin towers next to MOCA. Instead, there’s more art, displayed everywhere from the lobby to the rafters, some of the thousands of pieces in his collection. And instead of a snazzy, high-tech conference room, we meet in a chamber packed with books on Buddhism. Boonchai reconnected with Buddhism after a series of challenges that included the 1981 death of his father and the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which nearly ruined the business. He later changed the name Total Access Communication, or TAC, to DTAC. The D doesn’t refer to digital: “D is a character for good luck,” he explains.

 

  The meeting room is actually for monks, who lead prayer and meditation every Tuesday. Unless he’s traveling, Boonchai joins in. “I meditate every day,” he says, praising how it provides personal clarity, but “meditation by yourself is more difficult–your mind flows everywhere. There is just better synergy in groups.” He’s a follower and financial supporter of the Dhammakaya, a Buddhist movement that originally advocated a return to purity and simplicity. Then the group built a massive circular golden temple resembling a spaceship on the outskirts of Bangkok and has been in the news over controversial funding methods.

  Aside from art events, the 61-year-old Boonchai is rarely in the public eye. Most Thais know him as the magnate who married Bongkoj Khongmalai, a Thai actress who’s more than three decades younger. She is his third wife, and the couple have a son who’s nearly 2. Boonchai has five other children–”and I’m close to all of them,” he says proudly. The eldest, Suprata, 32, works for the foundation, while one of her two sisters, Boonyapa, 29, runs MOCA.

  At a time in life when many Asian tycoons are working overtime to expand empires, Boonchai is more in line with Getty and Guggenheim. “I can leave all the money, but the kids could spend it in a couple years. If I leave something like this,” he says, as we tour the museum, “it’s so much more important.” He eschews suits for the comfortable open-collar shirts worn by the painters he takes on trips to European art centers. His feet slide into worn loafers, no socks. “Greed can overcome us,” he adds, with a ring of meditative calm, “but not all of us will be overrun.”

  That Boonchai became so successful surprises nobody more than himself. The eldest in the family, he initially shunned the businesses started by his father, Suchin. “I was more interested in partying,” he says.

  Suchin’s father, Kow Tee Sing, came to Bangkok from Guangdong Province 95 years ago with nothing, but the rags-to-riches story begins with Suchin. He toiled in small Chinatown shops, and with many of Bangkok’s legacy hotels nearby, he taught himself English and built friendships instrumental in his ascent. Key to the family’s fortune was a military man, Prasert Rujirawong, who became a general, then national police chief. Prasert helped steer Suchin into a role servicing and later procuring equipment from Motorola. This became a booming business during the Vietnam War.

  As Motorola’s Thailand agent, Suchin became very close to Jim Searle, Motorola’s Southeast Asia head. Searle hailed from Illinois, and Suchin bought a lakeside home there. Boonchai spent two years in Searle’s home, attending high school and going on to a local junior college, Harper College, then to Northern Illinois University. He studied business, but his focus was on art–and partying. “Back then, if people asked what I wanted to do, I’d tell them to be a playboy or go to Paris to paint. I had no interest at all in business.”

  Back in Thailand, however, his father put him to work selling insurance, one of myriad family businesses under the Narai marque (there was also the Narai Hotel). “I asked, ‘Why insurance?’ And he told me, ‘If you can sell insurance, you can sell anything.’ ” Soon he was selling insurance against hail damage to Thai farmers in the north.

 His father’s death from liver cancer thrust Boonchai into an unexpected role, as company boss. He was only 27 and immediately uncovered a minefield of debt. “Dad had never shared his problems, and they were   unimaginable, a tsunami of trouble.” Even today he grows pained at the recollection of lawsuits and recriminations. He drank and smoked heavily but closed bad businesses, found new financing from old family friends and persevered.

  He also moved his family’s United Communications Industry, or UCOM, into mobile phones. Seeing the first handsets at Motorola was a glimpse of the future. He obtained an early license from the government, not long after Thaksin did. “I had a big head already, but I spent a long time with Motorola and saw it clearly,” he says. “It was a gold mine.” He listed UCOM in 1994, and then came the Asian financial crisis and the collapse of the Thai baht. Companies such as UCOM, which earned revenue from its DTAC unit in baht but had to buy equipment in a foreign currency, were pummeled.

  Boonchai endured, and evolved. The era of lucrative concessions handed out by governments and multinationals was winding down, and the mobile future belonged to companies with a strong partner. He linked up with Norway’s Telenor, an old state carrier expanding in Asia. The deal has been a huge success, for both sides.

  Stories of tenuous partnerships are commonplace, yet Sigve Brekke, Telenor’s longtime Asia head who negotiated the pact with Boonchai, has nothing but praise: “He has a nose for good timing. After the financial crisis, he decided to bring in a partner, not only for financing but also expertise. He saw telecoms in Thailand becoming more advanced. He’s been a great advisor in making calls, reading issues. He travels all over Thailand, meeting farmers, talking to local people.”

  Nowadays Boonchai is content to let Telenor run the business, collect DTAC dividends and focus his energy elsewhere. He’s happy to be remembered as “the arts guy.”
 

Ron Gluckman is an American reporter who has been roaming around Asia since 1991, for various publications, including Forbes, which ran this story in July 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesasia/2015/06/24/artistic-expression/

Boonchai portraits by Peter Charlesworth for Forbes; the rest by Ron Gluckman

All words copyright RON GLUCKMAN

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