There’s world-class photography right here on the island, so you don’t need to go to Bangkok or Paris to see it!
A Gallery That Changed Samui’s Cultural Setting
Just over a year ago, something significant happened on Koh Samui. In January 2025, House of Lucie Samui opened its doors for the first time, giving the island a genuine, world-class contemporary art space.
House of Lucie is the brainchild of Hossein and Apple Farmani, founders of the globally respected Lucie Foundation. Established in 2003, the non-profit is best known for the prestigious Lucie Awards, an annual ceremony at Carnegie Hall in New York honoring the world’s greatest achievements in photography. The name is a nod to the Latin word lux, meaning light, the element that makes photography possible.
House of Lucie has sister spaces in Athens, Budapest, Kazan, France, Norway, and beyond, but the Samui location is the Foundation’s first full-scale art centre. Apple Farmani said at the opening, “Samui is the perfect place for it.”
The gallery debuted with an extraordinary inaugural exhibition featuring legendary names of Steve McCurry, James Nachtwey, and Kitikong Tilokwattanotai, clearly showing this wasn’t an ordinary island gallery. Since then, House of Lucie has presented exhibitions on photojournalism from Gaza, the spirituality of the Moklen people, Thai design, ASEAN batik traditions, and International Design Award winners and all within its first year!
This brings us to its first anniversary, celebrated fittingly with an opening night on 21 March 2026 that launched two new exhibitions, both running until 24 May 2026. If you haven’t been yet, there is still time.
Exhibition One: Faces of Samui — Jatenipat Ketpradit (JKBoy)
There is something remarkably moving about seeing your own home reflected through an artist’s eyes.
Jatenipat Ketpradit, known as JKBoy, is one of Thailand’s most compelling documentary portrait photographers. Born in 1984, he has built his career seeking hidden and forgotten cultures, earning the trust of communities that rarely let outsiders in, and bringing their faces, with all their dignity, beauty, and complexity, to the wider world.
JKBoy has lived among nomadic families in Mongolia and spent a week with the Suri tribe in Ethiopia, one of the most remote communities on earth. He is celebrated internationally for capturing what he calls the traces on a face, the marks that reveal a life lived. His work in Ethiopia earned 1st Place in the People category at the Tokyo International Foto Awards 2022, with his image Horde of the Suri Tribe described as the defining shot of his career.
What makes JKBoy’s photography extraordinary is his process. He lives with his subjects, learns their languages, earns their trust, and builds real relationships before capturing a single frame. His mentor is Jimmy Nelson, and like Nelson, JKBoy believes photography’s point is not the image itself but preserving what risks being lost.
For his Faces of Samui exhibition at House of Lucie, JKBoy turns that same intimate gaze toward our island, exploring the faces, characters, and communities that make Koh Samui what it truly is beneath tourist brochures. This is Samui seen through the eyes of a Thai artist who understands the depth a face can hold.
Faces of Samui — on view until 24 May 2026.
Exhibition Two: Martin Schoeller
If JKBoy’s work entices you to look closely at the unfamiliar, Martin Schoeller asks you to look, without hierarchy or romance, at the faces you think you know. Schoeller is one of the most celebrated portrait photographers in the world.Born in Germany in 1968, he studied photography at the Lette Verein before moving to New York in the mid-1990s, where he began shooting portraits of strangers on the street. His work quickly attracted attention for its distinctive, unsettling intimacy, and since 1998, he has contributed to National Geographic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, TIME, Rolling Stone, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine.
He is best known for extreme close-up portraits, large-scale, detailed images that remove all backdrop, glamour, and narrative distance. A world leader, a Hollywood actress, an indigenous elder, a person experiencing homelessness, it doesn’t matter; Schoeller photographs them all the same way and with the same scale, clarity, and unflinching psychological intensity. The effect is radical in the quietest sense. It strips away celebrity and status, leaving only a human face.
As the Lucie Foundation describes it: “Familiar faces are treated with the same scrutiny as the un-famous… levelling them in an inherently democratic fashion.”
Schoeller’s work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and the Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia. In 2025, he was honoured with the Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture, making his exhibition at House of Lucie Samui a particularly fitting homecoming for the award and the space that bears its name.
The Samui exhibition features large-scale wall prints and video installations produced on Hahnemühle FineArt Inkjet paper, the format in which Schoeller’s work is meant to be experienced.
Schoeller attended the opening night in person on 21 March, giving guests the rare opportunity to meet and speak with one of photography’s greats.
Martin Schoeller — on view until 24 May 2026.
Visit before 24 May
Both exhibitions are free to enter and open Wednesday to Sunday, 13:00–18:00.
House of Lucie Samui / Samui Art Centre
2/23 ProoNaMueang Road, Moo 2, Maret Sub District, Koh Samui
Whether you go for the faces of our island or the faces of the world, you’ll leave seeing both a little differently.
Follow House of Lucie Samui on Instagram @houseoflucie.samui for the latest events and exhibitions.
