Dozen of unfinished and abandoned structures haunt Bangkok’s skyline. Started in the mid-1990s, many of these building were never used as luxury hotels or fancy apartments. Today – after the 1997 Asia debt crisis – they are the modern ruins of contemporary Bangkok’s landscape. Traces of abandon in a big city of almost 9 million of people can give signs of individual and private solitude, a feeling that the Canadian photographer Liam Morgan is showing in his last work “Abandon/Decay” exhibited at Kathmandu Photo Gallery in Bangkok.
He visited the Sathorn Unique and many other abandoned building structures, known also as “Ghost Towers” ,no one lives there only spirit from the Thai ghost stories that have long formed a part of the oral culture. Morgan has randomly selected found objects and then took “portraits” of them looking for an aesthetic of the decay, more like abstract expressionism than art brut accumulation. Among the found objects, there are also vintage photographs – the green collage –made in 1992 by anonymous workers or architects during the construction time.
Liam Morgan said in his artist statement, “decayed, objects often lose their symbolic power over the one who cast them off, but not always”.
Eliseo Barbàra
mostartists.com
Liam Morgan’s “Abandon/Decay”
Till on February 24th, 2013
Kathmandu Photo Gallery
87 Pan Road, Silom
Bangkok
Thailand
