Svay Sareth didn’t remember Cambodia, his own country. Growing up in Site 2, a refugee camp on the border of Thailand, he drew pictures of his homeland based on images he had seen in books. Yim Maline, who remained at home with her family during the Khmer Rouge period, made toys for herself out of cans and river reeds as a child, yearning for something more. “I want to be an artist,” Yim declared to Svay when they met later back in Cambodia. She followed this with a hesitant question: “What is an artist?”
The couple went on to answer that question for themselves. Yim and Svay achieved international recognition making art that remixed Cambodia for the next generation, first at the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Caen, later at residencies in New York City. Yim’s constructions of handmade paper and repurposed trash document the environmental devastation first of the civil war and genocide in the late 1970s and then of a surge in international investment, while Svay’s performance works and expansive sculptural pieces map out wartime trauma and its aftereffects.
In full: https://hyperallergic.com/986137/one-couples-bold-vision-for-the-future-of-cambodian-art/
