The unfinished Sathorn Unique Tower is lit up Thursday as part of an unsactioned lighting installation project. Photo: Dhyan Ho
It took two generator trucks generating 200,000 volts for 900 amps of power lighting to transform an abandoned eyesore into a smoldering edifice, but in the end the only complaints came from the advertisers, not the cops.
For three hours on Thursday night the abandoned dream that was to be the Sathorn Unique Tower was bathed in a ruddy glow from a battery of powerful production lights for a guerrilla lighting installation seeking to invoke its lesson on over-reaching.
“It was the owner of the company that does all the advertisements,” said the artist behind the “Monument” project, Liam Morgan. “He just happened to be driving by in his van with his driver. He saw it and freaked out a little bit. … He was worried the thing would interfere with his business.”
The shell of Sathorn Unique has become a canvas for a new generation’s material aspirations.
Morgan, 32, came to Thailand from Canada 12 years ago, when the kingdom was recovering from its diabetic crash following the sugar highs of the late ‘90s.
He selected the unfinished spire, which was abandoned near Thaksin Bridge after the economy tanked in 1997, to literally illuminate its message for society today, when the conditions of excess seem to have come around again.
“In Bangkok we see so much advertising everywhere, and it pushes people to strive to live a life according to what they see in that advertising,” Morgan said. “So people strive to live in that fake world, which kind of doesn’t exist.”
He looks around at the urban landscape, proliferated by speculative real estate megadevelopments and a frenzy of material aspirations, and sees the same conditions that were eventually, painfully “corrected” by economic forces. The Sathorn Unique seems to have failed to learn its own lesson, draped as it is with enormous advertisements promising a better life just up the hill. The previous generation’s failure to accept limitations is now the canvas for another’s ambitions of upward mobility.
Morgan said he’d been thinking about the project for a couple of years. He does work with movie production outfit VS Service, who decided to collaborate with him on the project – and loan their expensive outdoor set lighting equipment.
Morgan said the idea was to highlight an icon to human folly at a time when people are willfully subjecting themselves to “unhealthy” aspirations.
Artist Liam Morgan
“It’s a waste of energy and of life,” he said. “People get themselves into debt and stressful situations to try to get to a place you can’t actually get to.”
More than 100 people, some who’d heard of the event and others just passing by, created an impromptu picnic, sipping beers in a parking lot adjacent to Wat Yan Nawa where the installation was set up. They gazed at the wash of color spectrum-shifting the building into a new context. Some expected it to “do something.”
Whether Monument was a cautionary tale or just a footnote of the times, on Thursday night Morgan seemed content to be seen – if not heard.
Liam Morgan’s work is online at liammmm.com and a short video of the event will be released online “within a couple months.”
Photo: Dhyan Ho
Photo: Dhyan Ho
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