In “The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game” Chris Shaw returns to similar material as his first successful series “Life as a Night Porter”, but instead of London hotels we are amid the vibrant nightlife of a Thai holiday resort where he manages to find beauty in sordid situations.

Pattaya is a seaside resort in Thailand located 150 km south of Bangkok, which is famous for its go-go bars, a hedonistic atmosphere and connections to organized crime.The nightlife of ladyboys, gogo girls, clubs, bars and prostitution will soon be swept away. All will be just a memory, like the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec of fin de siecle Paris.  The power of the new Chinese economy is reflected in the growth of mass organised tourism, leading slowly to a cleaning up of Pattaya. The photographs document the end of an era.

Artist Profile

Chris SHAW

Chris Shaw completed his degree in Audio Visual studies at West Surrey College of Art & Design (now University for the Creative Arts) from 1986–89. In his 2006 monograph “Life as a Night Porter” (Twin Palms, 2006), Shaw published photographs of strange events he witnessed over a ten-year period between 1993 to 2004 whilst working as a night porter at a few hotels in London. His other books include “Before and After Night Porter” (Kehrer, 2012), “Weeds of Wallasey” (Superlabo, 2013), “Horizon Icon” (Adad, 2015), “Retrospecting Sandy Hill” (Morel Books, 2015), “Tokyo in Hong Kong” (Zen Foto Gallery, 2018), and “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” (Zen Foto Gallery, 2019).

Chris is represented in public collections of The Tate in London, Frac Des Pays de la Loire in Nantes and Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg. Chris held his first solo show in Cafe Tabac in Bold Street, Liverpool in 1991. Since then he has held numerous exhibitions in Paris, London, Stockholm, Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.