One of the nice elements of my job is that we train tour-guides; not much work really, the Thais conduct in-class lessons for half the course, and I take them out and about for the other half...
I've never been to the National Gallery, so on Friday I split two groups of 15 prospective TGs, and we went there to research the place - I spent the entire afteroon there.
So, a quick overview:
You could split the Gallery into 4 areas (or more). When we entered we turned right (the first gallery you come across) into a couple of rooms which contain the standard Thai royal pictures/portraits. Frankly, a very unfortunate start due to the limited quality of the work and just boringness of it all. After 10 mins in this gallery, we all felt that this may have been a bad choice...
Up the stairs to another gallery: full of ancient Buddhist art and high quality Thai historic art. Excellent. Very interesting and beautiful pieces, but with limited context/descriptions... I was lucky that four of my students were Art History majors, so they were able to tell many of the stories behind these pictures; an thoroughly enjoyable hour spent in this gallery.
Down the stairs to a gallery that started off with some Thai uniforms (military not university!!!) and portraits of hi-sos etc; it took 2 mins to walk through that area... Then we entered a pretty large 'main gallery' that started off with fairly boring and average quality 'standard pictures' before it increasingly became an area of modern art; 50 to 100 very interesting pictures - some 'multi-textual pieces', 'multi-modal' pieces and 'cross-medium' pieces. They were very very interesting; you could have spent a couple of hours looking over the pieces - the best Modern Art I've seen in Thailand by a very long distance; so much to talk about... One picture had a large elephant stomping over dead and decaying elephants in a post-apocolyptic type environment. The 'stomping elephant' had a golden palace atop of it - full of galavanting Pandas. Another picture had rabid 'polticized' dogs ringed around raping each other and the environment. Really strong social and political comments within beautiful pieces of art. Many other pieces had other reflections, of course; we could have chatted over these paintings for many hours...
Lastly, we came across an exhibition by Nir Segal - very cutting edge modern art stuff, and really interesting; basically, he's an Israelli artist commenting upon Bangkok via various mediums. An excellent exhibition, but was it/was it not art??? The students had different views.
All in all, this was a very enjoyable trip that you should try, if you're around Bkk. The exhibits change all the time; the Nir Segal exhibit is from 8th to 30th July, so you pays your money and takes your chances... The sad point is the start; pure Thai propaganda of the most boring kind, but just ignore that, or bypass it/look in for a couple of minutes at the end - enjoy the other areas to the full.