SKATEBOARDING IN BANGKOK: The Thai Skate Scene
Almost every city in the world has a skateboarding scene, with the environment defining the culture and style of skateboarders in each respective region.
Jasper Dohrs is a half-Thai, half-American professional skateboarder based in Bangkok, Thailand. Growing up in Seattle and going to college in New York, he experienced the contrast between East Coast and West Coast skate culture.
American skate cultures have been defined by over fifty years of tradition. However, skateboarding has become popular internationally slightly more recently. It’s still a new frontier for a handful of places around the world including Thailand, where the skate scene has grown exponentially over the past couple of years. During Jasper’s lifetime, he has witnessed and been a part of the growth and development of the Bangkok skate scene. With such a diverse international skateboarding background, he agreed to share his observations about skateboarding’s origins and culture in Thailand.
Hi Jasper, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in the Bangkok skate scene?
I’m Jasper Dohrs, I grew up in Seattle, and I started skateboarding when I was about nine years old. I’ve always had an obsession with skateboarding through the movies. If there was any little scene or snippet with skateboarding in it, I would always want to go back and rewatch that part. I think my parents knew that I was always pretty obsessed with it. Every other summer as a kid, I’d go to Thailand with my family because my mom’s Thai.
I quickly learned about the Thai skate scene just through going to parks, searching up skate videos on YouTube, and hanging out at the shops. It became very apparent that the Thai skate scene is kind of a microcosm industry, and it’s very big on its own. I moved to Thailand after graduating high school and I lived there for a gap year trying to just kind of figure myself out. After that, I moved to New York City for design school. I thought I was going to stay there for the full four years, but I got a contract offering with a shoe sponsor which is kind of rare in the skateboarding world. It was an opportunity I just had to take. I originally thought that I was going to be doing one more gap year in the middle of college, but instead I’ve just stayed in Bangkok and it’s been four years now. My class graduated already, haha.
That’s so awesome! So segueing into the actual skate scene in Bangkok, how has your experience skating there been different from your experience skating in places like Seattle or New York?
The main difference with skateboarding in Thailand is the weather. Skateboarding isn’t something you can do as casually throughout your day here. It’s so hot and humid that all of your clothes are going to be completely soaked through during the session. You have to bring a change of clothes and plan your day a little bit better. In New York or Seattle, you can kind of have a more open-ended day and just go with the flow on your skateboard.
In Thailand, you need to be a bit more organized and plan your day ahead of time. The sweat factor is brutal for most people unless you’re truly, truly local. Bangkok is also a lot more congested. Before I thought that New York was congested, but it’s nothing compared to what it’s like here. There’s not much sidewalk space, the infrastructure is pretty different, and it’s just harder to skate around the city from point A to point B.
Can you describe what the skate culture is like in Bangkok?
Surprisingly the skate culture in Bangkok is super strong. I ride for a Thai company called Preduce and it’s been around since 2002. We’re coming up on twenty years now, which is pretty rare for a skate company in Asia. I think a big visual cue to show that skateboarding culture is strong here is the number of DIY skate parks.
There are so many. There aren’t that many “proper” skateparks, maybe around three throughout the area. They’re all very spread out though. The main one in the city is right near where I live, it’s basically just a bank, a box, and a flat bar. It’s not much but it’s the spot where most of the best Thai skaters got really good. However, the park isn’t super accessible to people who live in other parts of the city. The DIY spots are interesting because if there’s a public space that’s vacant in a crew’s neighborhood, they’re going to build it out over time and kind of create that space for themselves and their friends. I think that shows the mentality and the love for skateboarding here, you know? People will spend their own time and money to make their own skateparks, and it happens constantly. It’s pretty incredible. I grew up skating full concrete American skateparks, so the learning curve was a lot faster than it would have been here. The fact that kids are able to get really, really good with slightly more limited resources is very impressive.
Speaking of Preduce, Who are some key players in Bangkok and how have they contributed to building the skate scene?
So my circle has done a lot over the past two decades, but I know that there are a lot of people who have brought it up a bit more locally as well. Preduce started as a small crew and company. It’s actually the first skateboard company in all of Thailand. The current owner is a Swiss guy named Simon Pellaux, he moved to Bangkok when he was in his early twenties. He had made a ton of skate friends here and saw the opportunity to become a part of Preduce and turn it into a larger company. Simon became in charge around 2006, but before that, Preduce was still really productive.
They had been making videos and shirts and I’m pretty sure boards as well. The main team that skates for Preduce now has pretty much been the same aside from a few of the newer kids. Geng Jakkarin, Lert Saeri, and Tao Kitpullap are the real Thai OGs. Those guys are known as some of the best skaters in Bangkok. It’s 2021 now and the team and company are doing better than ever before. Preduce has kind of built out to be more of a Pan-Asian team; we have one rider in Indonesia and another rider in the Philippines; we’re trying to spread out around Southeast Asia.
It’s still very family driven, we’ve gone on a lot of trips with everyone, it’s just a good time. For the upcoming video, we have three new younger guys. Fifa Tintarn who is nineteen, he’s from Korat which is about four hours outside of Bangkok. We have a kid named Boss Smith who is also nineteen, he’s originally from Bangkok, he’s super sick, and we have another kid named Beek Supavich who I’ve actually been skating with since I was eleven at this indoor mall in Bangkok. I joined the team in 2018 and was officially introduced in our Selamat video. Those kids are just about to be properly introduced to the team in the video we’re working on now. Preduce has been responsible for some of the most influential skate videos in Thailand.
I grew up with Preduce videos, the first video I bought was “Smooth” which was released in 2005. I came home from Thailand that summer with the DVD and I just watched it constantly. The music and everything about it was really attractive, so that video definitely means a lot to me, and it means a lot to the Thai skate scene as well. Definitely inspired a whole lot of kids. Preduce has six full-length videos under its belt coming up on seven now, which I think is pretty significant for any skateboard company, really. We love the process of going on trips throughout Asia and compiling footage, it’s a lot of fun.
Skating for Preduce, you have had the opportunity to go to a number of really interesting and unique places throughout Asia. Are there skate scenes in some of the less urban regions you’ve traveled to?
There are definitely skate scenes in smaller towns that I’ve been able to travel to. It’s really cool to see how skateboarding has syncretised in these spots. For example, on a recent Preduce trip we went to this place called Pak Chong, it’s a small town in the Northeast of Thailand. We had never been there to skate but we knew one or two local kids that lived there. All of the skate spots in Pak Chong that the locals skate at are parts of Buddhist temples, which would seem pretty taboo to anyone that’s not from there. A lot of our team members are Buddhist and they didn’t really feel too comfortable with it. However, in this town, the scene was so big that we would travel around with like thirty or forty of the local kids.
They all said that it was fine and that the monks were cool with it. They had developed a relationship with the monks to the point where they could skate these spots with no resistance at all. I had never seen that before, it was pretty crazy. Technically monks aren’t allowed to say no in general, you know? At first it was questionable as to whether they were actually cool with it, but the monks I talked to seemed pretty excited and told us all to enjoy the competition we were there for and have a good time.
How has Bangkok’s fashion scene been impacted by skateboarding?
So when Simon became the owner of Preduce, he started the first skate shop in the Siam area. That was kind of at the height of SB Dunks in the mid 2000’s, and Simon happened to have the only SB account in all of Thailand. At that time, skateboarding grew a lot street-culture wise in Bangkok due to those shoes being so desirable. A lot of his guys were riding for Nike and that had a big effect on street-culture too. That’s really the main thing I can think of, I would say we’re at a point where the internet is so accessible that trends get here maybe a year after they’re big out west. Like the Thrasher flame logo t-shirts were around here for like three to four years, they’ve only just started to die down.
Fashion here follows skateboarding just as much as anywhere else. We’ve got Vans, Thrasher shirts, Dickies, Palace, Supreme. The whole works. Those global trends are pretty consistent throughout the world now. Maybe some countries are a bit later than the others, but they all enjoy the same things eventually. Thailand also has a huge vintage t-shirt community. There’s a lot of flea markets and people come from all over the place just to pick up t-shirts. I don’t know what it is with global shipping, but a lot of t-shirts tend to end up in Thailand. That culture of $3000 Scarface tees is all here. I have a lot of friends who make a living off of doing that. It sounds awesome, you just have to be super knowledgeable about that sort of thing.
You also have to dig through a whole lot of t-shirts, haha. But yeah, the bottom line is secondhand clothing culture here is really huge. Silvertab Levi’s, Nautica, ACG, band t-shirts, movie t-shirts, people curate those things similarly to how they do it in Japan. There are so many connoisseurs out here, I’ve been to people’s houses where it’s just t-shirts all over the place. From the floor to the ceiling.
How has COVID affected the skate community in Bangkok?
It’s skyrocketed the sales of skateboards throughout the country, and I think throughout Asia as well. It’s been really hard for most companies to get their hands on boards right now because a lot of the factories are so delayed. So pretty much since COVID, every time that they restock Preduce with new boards, trucks, or wheels, everything sells out within that month. We just had a really big restock so things should hopefully last, but basically I think that COVID has boosted skateboarding’s popularity just because it’s something kids can do on their own in front of their house.
There’s definitely a trend involved, but I firmly believe that at least one out of ten people who pick up a skateboard will be hooked for life. I’ve just talked about the sales alone, but when you actually go to some of the skateparks, it’s tripled the amount of people that we used to see this time last year. They’re packed man, I try to avoid them now just because of COVID but also the fact that I don’t want to run any little kids over. The parks are too small for the number of people who are going nowadays.
What would you say is next for yourself and for the skate scene in Thailand? Do you think that it will become a lot more commercial, or do you think that Thai skaters will continue to carry on the spirit of resourcefulness?
For Preduce and myself, we’re currently working on the full-length video as I mentioned. It will hopefully come out within the next month or so which is pretty exciting. I’ve also started a line of utility shorts that are designed to withstand everything that comes with being a skater here. Or just being active in general, they’re not just skate shorts. I really want them to be as functional as possible, changing outfits all the time is a hassle so having a solid pair of shorts that will keep me comfortable throughout the day is something I wanted to bring to the market. That’s a long term project though, still working out the details.
As for the skate scene, I think it’s going to remain resourceful for the time being. Like I said, a lot of figures in the Thai skateboarding community have come to the conclusion that they can just build their own skateparks. I think DIY spots will continue to pop-up all throughout the city like they have been. More skateboarders are opening their own businesses and spaces, which is really cool to see. The Olympics will also obviously have some effect on the scene. The curve of popularity is just going to get higher and higher, we thought skateboarding peaked at its level of “trendiness” four years ago, but it’s still moving its way up in mainstream culture. Sky’s the limit at this point. I only see it growing exponentially.
Thank you for your time!
About the author:
Koko Bond-Razak is a seventeen-year-old creative based in Washington, DC. When he’s not working on schoolwork and college applications, he’s building his skills as a freelance writer and videographer.
Photos by Janchai Montrelerdrasme, Kun Phumitavorn, and Jasper Dohrs
