While Morgan may see the happiness of his figures, he is aware only too well that the surface calmness and apparent stability can become seething turmoil. Over the past two decades, China has experienced such rapid changing fortunes that people can only wait and try to predict what change will come next and how it will affect them. During the Cultural Revolution people immersed themselves in newspapers and magazines to find out how to be politically correct, to know which movement was in and which was out, how to be aware of rapid change and so survive. The bitter arbitrariness of the devastating Cultural Revolution has gone, for the most part, but the reforms that have burst upon the Chinese people and society during the past two decades have created another kind of emotional and psychological minefield. Water represents society and the cultural environment, the confusion of it.
People are able to lose themselves in it.
People are swept up in the current without knowing why sometimes. The faces stare out at the viewer almost entirely expressionless, waiting, trapped in a moment of time, their world's encapsulated by a single action. The difference here is that Morgan's figures are not the generally happy ones that one finds in photo-albums. The faces here rarely smile as they float or tread water. The directness of Morgan's work is one of its most attractive qualities.