Contemporary Artists Reject Old Verities to Tackle New Themes
Some visitors to Phnom Penh find its bustling gallery scene among the city’s unexpected charms—until a closer look reveals that the scene is dominated by official portraits of King Norodom Sihanouk, punctuated here and there by mass-produced oil paintings of Angkor Wat.
“The problem isn’t a lack of skilled and imaginative artists,” Casey Barnett, founder of the Contemporary Art Development Project, explained Tuesday. “Even artists with outstanding overseas educations find themselves prey to small gallery owners, most of whom just happen to own buildings in the right location and commission specific types of paintings.”
In his determination to create a forum for Cambodia’s studio artists, the 26-year-old American has done more than condemn the sterility of the local art market. Barnett set up an art-oriented NGO, through which he has organized what he characterizes as the first national exhibition of contemporary art since 1964.
The exhibition, which opened Friday at the Sunway Hotel near Wat Phnom, features the work of 45 local artists, ranging from European-trained professionals to those who studied traditional temple painting under rural monks.
“This is the first real chance the public will have to see what serious artists are doing in Cambodia,” Barnett said. “The work runs the gamut from Social Realist depictions of peasants and workers to socially aware portrayals of urban poverty to highly personal compositions with little or no social or political commentary.”
But the show is also notable, he added, for what is not there. Few viewers will miss the hackneyed national symbols that dominate city galleries. And some may be surprised at the absence of works dealing with the 1975-79 Pol Pot regime, which are usually commissioned by foreign patrons who identify Cambodia with its tragic recent past.
“Cambodian artists are simply not interested in dealing with [the Khmer Rouge era], on either an aesthetic or cathartic level,” Barnett explained. “Vann Nath, the painter who survived Tuol Sleng, told me that he hated producing all of those paintings [about Tuol Sleng]. It made him physically ill….And many of the artists who participated in this exhibition asked me beforehand, ‘We don’t have to do paintings of the Pol Pot regime, do we?’”
One exception to this rule, Tum Sarin’s “Exodus,” which portrays the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, appears to be a subtle commentary on more recent events. The painting’s central grouping, three monks cowering before Khmer Rouge cadre, is modeled on a photograph that appeared in The Cambodia Daily shortly after the 1998 elections.
Commenting on the exhibition’s importance to local artists, 34-year-old painter Venn Sovat said Wednesday: “Most Cambodian artists have broad knowledge and are always coming up with new ideas. Sometimes they cannot even imagine they have such splendid ideas. But because of many problems, they cannot show their original work….And in the end, they have to make a living.”
Venn Sovat’s single entry, a Bayon head bedecked in a necktie, reflects the whimsical blend of traditional and modern Cambodian imagery that characterizes his work. Asked if the work was a commentary on either modern politics or traditional culture, he said: “The message is in the painting, and each viewer can decide himself what it means. I want people who look at my picture to at least understand a part of my message.”
Dara Bunhim, the group’s project coordinator, noted that the rich diversity found in the local art community often surprises foreign observers who look beyond the tepid gallery scene. “I’m not an artist myself,” he said. “But growing up in a neighborhood near the University of Fine Arts [in Phnom Penh], it was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement of what the artists were trying to do—even though they had little support and nowhere to show their work.”
Despite a rich artistic heritage and tradition of temple painting, the visual arts, in the modern sense, have shallow roots in Cambodia, Barnett noted. Art exhibitions held here in the 19th and early 20th centuries, under the auspices of the region’s French colonial rulers, tended to showcase Vietnamese artists. And the sole school of painting in the former Indochina was located in Saigon, not Phnom Penh.
In the 1960s, support for the visual arts came from an unexpected source, the US government, which sponsored the country’s most recent national art exhibition, Dara Bunhim said.
But the biggest boon to the local art community came two decades later, as part of Soviet support for the Vietnamese-backed government of the People’s Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. “Soviet aid made it possible for Cambodian artists to be educated in renowned art schools in Kiev and Moscow, as well as in France and Poland,” Barnett said. “And one of the biggest surprises awaiting me was the sheer competence of many local artists. I was simply overwhelmed.”
