Pol Pot’s portrait painter who captured the pain of a nation

September 9, 2011
Financial Times

Nothing brings home the industrial scale of the horror the Khmer Rouge inflicted on Cambodia as much as Tuol Sleng, the former high school in a leafy Phnom Penh suburb that became the centre of its cult of torture. The rusting implements of pain lie where they were abandoned and on the walls hang the photographs of thousands of victims – and graphic paintings of torture by Vann Nath, a former inmate.

Like thousands of prisoners before and after him, Vann Nath, an artist who died on Monday, aged 65, was photographed by his captors: a blank face, heavy eyebrows and a wispy beard, dressed in the plain black shirt that was the national uniform under the Khmer Rouge.

But Nath survived, one of only 14 people to emerge from the prison, to use the rest of his life to bear witness in paintings and words to the suffering of thousands of others less fortunate. He used the skills the Khmer Rouge had once employed for propaganda purposes to paint portraits of Pol Pot, to condemn his former oppressors and become an internationally recognised symbol of gentle dignity in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

He was imprisoned in Tuol Sleng, dubbed S-21 by the Khmer Rouge, on January 7 1978, exactly a year before Vietnamese forces liberated Phnom Penh. Nath said he never knew why he was arrested. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge was running Pol Pot’s dystopian interpretation of the Maoist concept of Permanent Revolution: suspects were tortured to reveal the names of other further suspects and then killed. Those who had been named were then arrested and the cycle started again, creating an endless loop of carnage.

Tuol Sleng was never a prison in the western sense. There was no idea of imprisonment as a punishment or for rehabilitation. It was a transit centre: prisoners were tortured for confessions and then killed, their guilt taken for granted.

Vann Nath survived because of an unlikely series of coincidences. Born into a farming family in Battambang in north-west Cambodia in 1946, he had specialised in painting billboards before the arrival of the Khmer Rouge. His arrest coincided with Pol Pot’s decision to come out of the shadows. Nath was put to work painting hundreds of portraits of the man known as Brother Number One.

His skills gave him a degree of protection from physical violence in the latter part of his incarceration but he witnessed what happened to his fellow inmates. “I could hear screams of pain from every corner of the prison. I felt a twinge of pain in my body at each scream . . .  I could hear the guards demanding the truth, the acts of betrayal, the names of collaborators,” Nath wrote in his memoir.

After the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, he returned to work at S-21, which had been turned into a museum. He painted pictures of the routine torture and murder – a man having his nails pulled out, a hog-tied prisoner having his throat cut, a thrown child being bayoneted – which still hang on the walls today. His elongated bodies and naive technique blurred the lines between art and testimony.

Of more than 14,000 people who entered S-21 only 14 survived according to the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, which has accumulated a huge archive of original documents from the era.

“There were very few heroes in this whole thing,” says Professor David Chandler, a historian who has written extensively about the Khmer Rouge and S-21. “He was a lighthouse of regret and concern about this whole period.”

As his fame grew, boosted by appearances in documentaries such as Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, he travelled the world, spending time as artist in residence at Providence College, Rhode Island and visiting Europe to speak about his experiences.

In 2007, his documentation of S-21 won him the Hellman/Hammett award for courage in the face of political persecution. In 2009, he finally got a measure of the justice he had sought for more than 30 years. He was the first survivor to testify during the long-delayed trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, Tuol Sleng’s head.

“We only had three spoons of gruel for each meal. I lost my dignity . . .  I thought even eating human flesh would be a good thing for me at that moment,” he told the court.

Duch was given a 35-year sentence – he is appealing – but Vann Nath declined to list himself as a civil party to the suit. In his later years, Nath ran a gallery and restaurant but suffered mounting health problems. After a heart attack last month he spent his last few days in a coma at a Phnom Penh hospital.

He is survived by his wife Kith Eng, two daughters and a son. With his death, only two survivors of Tuol Sleng remain.

For a video about Vann Nath’s life, visit www.ft.com/vannnath