Can Art Save Phuket? Island Paradise Bets on Creative Tourism
The island paradise of Phuket, perpetually draped in the seductive and suffocating glow of tourism, is about to test a new proposition: that art can be a firewall against the very forces that threaten to consume it. The Phuket News reports that the “Asialink Sketch Walk Phuket 2025” will descend this August, promising “sustainable creative tourism.” But to see this as a simple arts initiative is to miss the deeper currents at play: a desperate, and perhaps quixotic, attempt to re-engineer the island’s relationship with global capital.
Tourism, as typically practiced, often isn’t just like a colonial extractive industry; it is one, updated for the 21st century. Foreign money flows in, experiences are packaged and sold, and locals are too often relegated to precarious service roles, all while bearing the environmental and cultural brunt. The Sketch Walk, however, gestures toward a different model — one that ideally strengthens local identity instead of homogenizing it into bland, Instagrammable moments. As Phuket Vice Governor Samawit Suphanphai noted:
“These events reflect the rich cultural and artistic diversity of Phuket and support our vision of sustainable creative tourism.”
But can art truly inoculate a place against the corrosive effects of tourism dependency? Can brushstrokes and easels rewrite an economic system?
Phuket’s play for art tourism is not operating in a vacuum. We are amidst a global shift where cities and regions are increasingly leveraging culture for economic development, a phenomenon fueled by anxieties about deindustrialization and the rise of the experience economy. Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, often touted as the paradigm, sparked a building boom and a cultural renaissance, reshaping the city’s industrial image. Cities see arts funding as economic stimulus, seeking to attract affluent, creative-class tourists who supposedly spend more and leave a smaller ecological footprint than the average beach bum — a vision often traced back to Richard Florida’s theories on the “creative class.”
However, the Bilbao effect is more aspiration than guarantee; it relies on a complex alchemy of factors that are rarely replicable. Sociologist Sharon Zukin has long argued that “authenticity” itself becomes a commodity in these situations, leading to a staged version of local culture that caters to tourist expectations rather than reflecting genuine community life. Consider the proliferation of “authentic” Irish pubs worldwide — less about genuine Irish culture and more about a marketable simulacrum. Phuket’s challenge lies in ensuring that this “creative tourism” is participatory, empowering local artists, and genuinely showcasing its unique identity, rather than simply turning local experiences into neatly packaged sketches for consumption. It is imperative to resist the temptation of cultural commodification that reduces everything to a performance for outsiders, a trap all too easy to fall into when chasing tourist dollars.
Anchalee Vanich Thepabutr, President of the Phuket Arts Association, emphasizes the importance of connecting communities through art, saying the Sketch Walk will “inspire new ways of seeing Phuket” while celebrating the everyday beauty of its landscapes and people. This framing represents the idealistic, if still nascent, core of this shift. Art as engagement, art as identity-building.
For decades, Phuket has banked on pristine beaches, a singular bet exposed as dangerously fragile by events like the 2004 tsunami and the recent pandemic. Diversifying, as the event organizers hope, means offering an alternative to the sun-sea-sand formula that risks oversaturation and ecological collapse. Art offers a lens through which visitors can engage with the complex narratives and histories of the island. It also builds local capacity by centering and valuing domestic cultural forms, skills, and ideas. But perhaps the most important question is this: can art, and the “sustainable creative tourism” it promises, rewrite the fundamental power dynamics that have long defined Phuket’s relationship with the world? As Phuket’s leadership seeks to mitigate its historical vulnerability to tourism shocks and capture long-term value, focusing on the local-global cultural exchange may prove vital for its own sustainable future. Or, perhaps, it will simply become another layer of gloss on a system that remains fundamentally unchanged. The sketch walk may reveal more about our aspirations for a different kind of globalization than it does about Phuket itself.
