The architect and designer Kulapat Yantrasast has been appointed artistic director of the 2027 Bukhara Biennial, set to take place from 3 September to 21 November. He will take over from the biennial’s inaugural artistic director, Diana Campbell.
Born in Bangkok and based in Los Angeles, Kulapat Yantrasast is the founder and creative director of WHY Architecture. Founded in 2004 in Los Angeles, WHY is an architectural practice known for its work with cultural institutions, including the recent designs of the ILMI Science Discovery & Innovation Center in Riyadh, ongoing, Dib Bangkok, completed in 2025, and the redesign of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Michael C. Rockefeller wing in New York, reopened in 2025. For Milan Design Week 2026, Yantrasast collaborated with the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) on When Apricots Blossom, a project bringing together international designers and Uzbek artisans around craft traditions from the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan and the disappearance of the Aral Sea.
‘The 2025 edition was remarkable, reawakening Bukhara’s role as a true center of cultural exchange. My ambition for 2027 is to deepen that conversation – to treat infrastructure itself as culture, where caravanserais, madrasas, hammams, public squares, and garden become living rooms for ideas exchanged between artists, artisans, ecologists, and scholars,’ said Yantrasast in a statement. ‘This is long work. The biennial in 2027 will end; Bukhara will keep going. What matters to me is that every commission, every restored building, every garden we touch, every encounter between an artisan and a participant is a seed planted for the generations who will inherit this city.’
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