9. Hard and Soft Power in the Thai Pavilion

With the much-loved King Bhumibol Adulyadej (r.1946-2016) on his virtual deathbed while the 2015 Milan International Exposition was being planned and became operational, it is hardly surprising that the pavilion’s content reflected the nation’s anxieties more acutely than it engaged with the fair’s food-oriented theme. While the exterior of the national pavilion expressed an organic, earthy quality that departed for the usual iconic Thai temple architecture, the interior offered up a series of three discrete sites in which fairgoers were bombarded with visual stimuli that conflated the country’s abundant natural resources with corporatized food production, ultimately wrapping it up in a paean to the King for his role in virtually single-handedly creating a more efficient agricultural sector.