ABSTRACT
After the near-complete eradication of culture during the Khmer Rouge regime, it took until the late 1990s for the arts in Cambodia to begin to recover. However, over the last decade and a half the visual arts have started to thrive, with Khmer artists now gaining significant international recognition. Organizations at the forefront of early post-war artistic recuperation include Reyum, Sa Sa Arts, Java Arts in Phnom Penh, and Phare Ponleu Selpak in Battambang. More recently galleries such as Sa Sa Bassac and Romeet, along with art festivals such as the Angkor Art Explo, have contributed to further increasing the artistic infrastructure of the country. In 2013, several organizations came together to hold a three-day conference in Siem Reap on the topic of new approaches to Khmer visual cultures, with a large number of the papers addressing questions of modern and contemporary art and, in 2014, an issue of Udaya (see Corey and Thompson 2014) was dedicated to contemporary Cambodian arts and aesthetics, each highlighting the depth of discourse taking place in visual culture on and in Cambodia. 1
The central aim of this chapter is to paint a picture of the precise historical foundation from which the present time has emerged before introducing some key artists practicing in Cambodia today. The period of French colonial rule, from 1863 to 1953, saw colonial discourses dictating a national artistic identity, inflected by the contours of colonial historiography, which seeped into post-colonial Cambodia. 2 The 1970s were marked by civil war, culminating in the nearobliteration of culture under the genocidal Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. The majority of Cambodia’s artists and intellectuals either perished during the regime, which deliberately targeted these groups, or emigrated in the lead-up to the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom Penh in 1975. These two historical moments are inextricably linked, as the recovery from war and destruction forced, at a certain level, a return to colonial tropes of national identity. 3 From the aftermath of genocide to today, there continues to be very little government investment in the visual arts, with the exception of the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA) in Phnom Penh. Instead artists, exhibitions, collectives, and educational initiatives have emerged independently of government involvement. These are often funded and instituted by international actors, a situation which has provoked ongoing conversations over the role that foreign agents play in intervening, sustaining, and developing artistic practices in Cambodia. One notable exception to this situation is the collective Stiev Selapak (which loosely translates as Art Rebels)
who, via their Sa Sa Arts Project, seek to provide an alternative model of artistic engagement in a landscape viewed as “over-saturated” by foreign involvement (Vuth 2014).
