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Works by Oeur SokunTevy from 2010
Sokuntevy OEUR (Tevy) is a female painter from Cambodia who is boldly leading the charge of the country’s emerging women’s art movement. Tevy is certainly not afraid to speak her mind or ask questions. At the forefront of her practice is an impassioned personal search to determine where, as an independent woman and artist, she can identify herself within contemporary Cambodian society. Her gender and professional status as an artist, coupled with her unrelentingly honest approach to her subject matter, are a rare and precious combination.
The Buddhist Bug Project by Anida Yoeu Ali
The Buddhist Bug is the concept of artist Anida Yoeu Ali, and a project of Studio Revolt. In the artist statement she explains: “The Buddhist Bug Project seeks to map a new spiritual and social landscape through its surreal existence amongst ordinary people and everyday environments. The Buddhist Bug is a fantastic saffron-colored creature that can span the length of a 30-metre bridge or coil into a small orange ball. Rooted in an autobiographical exploration of identity, the Bug comes from the artist’s own spiritual turmoil between Islam and Buddhism. Set amongst everyday people in ordinary moments, the Bug provokes obvious questions of belonging and displacement.”
The Bug is an other-worldly creature with bright orange “skin” the color of Buddhist monk robes with a head piece based on the Islamic hijab. Together with photographer Masahiro Sugano (her creative partner from Studio Revolt), Anida brought the Bug to Cambodia, the country of her birth and of the Bug. She created a series of site-specific performances, inserting the Bug into urban and rural landscapes, resulting in humorous and surreal scenarios.
http://javaarts.org/exhibitions/detail/?id=168
A letter to my mother, by Chath pierSath
Originally published in After (2011)
A Letter to My Mother
My eyes, mother,
are much like yours,
wilted, full of tears.
My hands flail
fighting death in my dreams.
My complexion’s clay blood,
and my face aims for the sky,
with the hope that one day
I will understand
the ways of the world.
I see you in the distance,
one foot wounded,
limping home on an empty dirt road
looking for your children.
The Khmer Rouge had taken them
taken them
to Angka’s slave labor.
For three years there was no news.
The one son remaining,
I watched you search for answers
about a war
you could not win.
Like other mothers
you tried to battle it,
your intentions to save
what was left of your children.
With no rice for our plates,
you shaking with fever,
my two-year-old sister
swelling from starvation,
I went begging and gathering
to keep you both breathing.
I remember you calling my name
while I sat in a tree
eating leaves
to delay starvation.
I tried begging for rice
but the men who were eating
did not care.
They turned their backs
and laughed.
And I stood watching them.
I wanted to stay in that tree
among foliage rotten from suffering,
but your assurance,
your fine, thin hands stretching
peeled me down
from my hungry embrace.
Like the tree receiving
sun and rain for sustenance,
I took your words and tears
as my food.
But I so feared, mother
when you became gaunt and frail,
that you would leave me
orphaned in that mad country.
You lived to see
the return of your missing children.
Though on the torture list
of the Khmer Rouge,
the Vietnamese saved you
as their bombardment
sent the Pol Pot army fleeing.
But again, one by one,
your children left:
one killed by Khmer Rouge
one a refugee in a Thailand camp
and three off to the United States.
One son was missing.
In spite of hunger
you kept living,
chanting prayers,
calling upon your dead husband,
invoking your ancesters, your deity
to pour rain on the earth,
to stop the war and stop others
from disarranging your home,
rearranging your fate,
and deranging your children.
Oh mother, I am grateful
for your sorrowful strength,
for your woman’s instinct
to preserve life,
and for the dignity of your womb.
When you left us
two daughters remained at your side,
and the grandchildren you knew
starved to death.
The ones you never met
wished for your presence.
Now waiting is all I can do
to lay flowers on your grave,
to say goodbye,
to embrace you one last time,
to present myself to you
and show you how I am,
your son.
Distant Geography
Distant Geography looks at the work of Cambodian Diaspora artist Chath pierSath, bringing together his collages and writings, exploring language and his unique visual vocabulary as forms of storytelling, history-making and investigation of self. Autobiographical, and often intimate, writings are found on the backs of collages layered with magazine and newspaper cutouts, paintings and drawings. In many of the writings, pierSath talks to his family, to Cambodia, to warmongers and their victims as if writing them a letter or a diary entry, which is part of the construction of a more complex image. Like his collages, the words are written, re-written, painted over and layered with prose and imagery, creating works that exist at the intersection of literature and painting.
The act of displaying such private forms of writing like letters and diaries, is a provocative gesture in a country where emotions are often hidden or carefully coded in daily interactions. pierSath’s process of collage and assembly has been described as performance, a reorganizing of chaos. Like many collage artists before him, the meaning of the work is not in the individual marks but in the larger work that is created by the combination of the materials, the content and how they relate to each other. It is an act of re-ordering and in this context one of assertion that the individual is valid and important.
Currently exhibited at JavaArts (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
Artworks by Chath pierSath from exhibition Distant Geography