ផ្លូវជាតិលេខ៥​ I National Road Number 5 (2020)

13 photographies
Year: 2020
Size: 60 x 90cm
Edition: 5 + 2AP

With a length of 407kilometers, National Road Number 5 connects Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh with the border of Thailand. In 2014, the Cambodian government received $230 million in grant aids and loans from the Japanese government for road expansion based on the expressed economic purposes of transforming existing land to roadside industrial zones while facilitating the transportation of goods between Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City which are expected to grow after ASEAN integration.

Throughout 2015, artist Lim Sokchanlina has documented the effects of the expansion on the architectural landscape of the roadside as it widens from 11 to 24 meters. His photographs portray a range of domestic structures in transitional phases. In some cases, the road has crept to the edge of the dwelling, in others the building as been cut in half, or demolished. Residents have been offered compensation that is reportedly unsatisfactory. Lim’s landscapes seem to record a past, present, and future at once; wooden homes have spotted the agrarian landscape for centuries as part of subsistence farming economies / recently, transforming economies and markets have offered new markets and materials, influencing architecture and lifestyle shifts / soon, both the traditional and the hybrid structures will become neighbors with sprawling industrial zones.