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.”