Sala Keoku Sculpture Park

About this Place

Sala Keoku is one of the most surreal and visually extraordinary places in Thailand — a vast outdoor sculpture garden filled with enormous concrete Hindu and Buddhist figures built by the self-proclaimed shaman and spiritual teacher Luang Pu Bunleua Sulilat between 1978 and his death in 1996. The park contains over 200 sculptures, some towering 25 metres high: multi-headed nagas coiling across the ground, a giant pumpkin-shaped structure containing seven floors of cosmological scenes that visitors can enter and climb, the wheel of life and death, terrifying demons, serene meditating Buddhas, and a surreal intermingling of Hindu, Buddhist, and shamanistic imagery that defies orthodox religious categorisation. The aesthetic is entirely outside mainstream Thai art tradition — raw, visionary, and obsessive in the manner of great outsider art. The sculptor first built Xieng Khuan (Buddha Park) across the Mekong in Vientiane, Laos, before fleeing the Communist regime to Thailand. A genuinely unique experience unlike anything else in Southeast Asia.