Cocktails & Conversation: Kulapat Yantrasast with Jason Kaufman

Cocktails & Conversation is a series of dialogues about design that joins an architect with a critic, journalist, curator, or architectural historian to discuss current architecture design issues. For this program, Kulapat Yantasast will sit down with Jason Kaufman over a custom-crafted cocktail.

Speaker:
Kulapat Yantrasast, Founder and Creative Director, wHY

Interviewer:
Jason Edward Kaufman, author and architecture critic

Kulapat Yantrasast was born in Bangkok and trained in Japan, where he received his master’s and PhD degrees in architecture from the University of Tokyo. He subsequently worked for eight years as a close associate of the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando. Yantrasast established wHY in 2004 with the intention of combining his experience in the art world with a deep commitment to cultural inclusivity and human flourishing.

He has been named as one of the art world’s 100 Most Powerful People, and he is the first architect to receive the Silpathorn Award for Design from Thailand’s Ministry of Culture. Yantrasast serves on the board of a number of cultural institutions including the Artists’ Committee of Americans for the Arts and as trustee of the Noguchi Museum in New York City and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Jason Edward Kaufman is a widely read arts journalist whose criticism and reporting have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other publications, including The Art Newspaper, for which he served as Chief US Correspondent for 19 years. A member of the International Association of Art Critics, Kaufman has contributed to exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, the Morgan Library in New York, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and MASSMOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

A recipient of the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he also taught contemporary art, Kaufman has lectured widely and served as a US Department of State speaker specialist at an “Art in Media” conference in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 2008.