Meta House in Phnom Penh Opens Exhibition Remembering the Vietnam War

Suntuntak Piteak (Cambodia, born 1967), About Pol Pot. Oil painting, 100 x 120 cm. Pol Pot killed more than 3 million members of his own race. (Click on the painting to zoom in)

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
ArtDaily.org

PHNOM PENH.- "Art of Survival" is back! The Khmer Rouge genocide and its impact on the Cambodian society today is reflected by Cambodian artists Pich Sopheap, Chat Piersat, Chhouen Rithy, Chan Vitarin, Ching Taingchea, Khauch Touch, Koung Channa, Phe Sophon, Kong Vollak, Kvay Samnang, Tor Vutha and many more – accompanied by foreign guests such as Vietnamese-Khmer artist Le Huy Hoang, who visits Phnom Penh for the first time since the 1980s. Other participants are Bradfort Edwards (USA), Panca Evenblij (Netherland) and Ali Sanderson (Australia), Virginie Noel (Belgium) and Herbert Mueller (Germany). Special screenings take place on the META HOUSE rooftop - about the KR genocide and the Vietnam War.

For the highly acclaimed AOS exhibition Meta House is partnering with the "Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center". The center (founded by famous film director Rithy Panh) collects and safeguards audiovisual documents about Cambodia in order to open access to the memory and pass it on to the new generations. At Bophana they will also screen the video documentation of the first AOS exhibition “Cambodian artists speak out: The Art of Survival” (Khmer/Engl.), that has been produced in cooperation with the KONRAD–ADENAUER–FOUNDATION (KAS). The book with the same title will also be available in both locations.

Boasting more than 200 square meters of art exhibition space, the three storey META HOUSE gallery in Phnom Penh/Cambodia offers an excellent space for artists-in-residence and visiting artists to interact. The kingdom's first art/media/communication center promotes the development of contemporary art in Cambodia through local and international exhibitions, workshops, community-based projects, artist exchange programs and by fostering links with South East Asian and international universities, galleries, curators, non-governmental and governmental organizations.

Cambodia's KRouge genocide inspires first of its kind art exhibit

Cambodian artist Svay Ken
Cambodian artist Svay Ken, 76, gives the final touches to his painting
Cambodian artist Svay Ken

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — Forced from his home by the Khmer Rouge, Svay Ken remembers joining tens of thousands of other Cambodians choking the roads leading away from the capital Phnom Penh more than 30 years ago.

Carrying what few household goods he could grab in the frantic hours after the communist guerrillas' seizure of the city, he clutched his children's hands, terrified they would be swallowed by the crush of bodies.

Although not yet the painter he would become, Svay Ken -- now a frail but driven 76-year-old who has emerged as one of Cambodia's pre-eminent contemporary artists -- remembers desperately trying to commit each moment of his ordeal to memory.

"I thought that if I survived this, I would record these experiences in paint to preserve the memory of what I experienced," he recalls, sitting in the living room of his Phnom Penh apartment.

One of those memories, rendered in a primitive style, shows grim, black-clad patients lining up to be fed out of a communal bucket.

Entitled "Khmer Rouge hospital," it is among two dozen works displayed at Phnom Penh art gallery Meta House in the first exhibit of its kind, called "Art of Survival".

Through paint, sculpture, charcoal or pencil, Cambodian artists have converged to create works inspired by the 1975-1979 rule of the Khmer Rouge, during which as many as two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed by the regime.

But organisers say it reaches beyond Cambodia's genocide to illuminate some more universal truths about humanity and its capacity to both hurt and heal, and they hope to take the exhibit on the international circuit.

"Examining the complexity and horror of the Pol Pot regime is not only important and relevant for the Cambodian people -- it is of great concern for the rest of the world as well," says American artist Bradford Edwards.

"The weathered cliche 'It can happen anywhere' must be applied here, for no nation is immune to the possibility of genocide," he adds.

For Edwards, who has set out to expand the show in order to introduce a global audience to Cambodian artists, "Art of Survival" serves dual purposes: to create art out of one of Cambodia's most destructive periods and to open a window onto the country's nascent art scene.

"I'm trying to make this exhibition appeal to the widest variety of people," he said.

"Art of Survival" spans the range of emotions and experiences that are tied to the defining moment in modern Cambodia's history.

Fear and violence are evident in the more literal works of older artists who survived the regime -- bleached skulls crowding canvases, or a bound and blindfolded figure bending under the foot of a Khmer Rouge cadre.

Younger artists born in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge's rule produced more abstract interpretations of the genocide, like Vandy Rattana's "Going Fanatic," a photograph of squares of light crowded between the communist movement's hammer and sickle and two blocks representing the United States.

"It's a political chessboard," says the 28 year-old.

"Cambodia's war was not just created by Cambodia -- it belonged to the world. If we talk about war in Cambodia we need to talk about Vietnam, the United States," he adds.

The exhibition, he says, "gives me a voice to say something about my history".

Edwards says this dialogue through art is long overdue, and calls the exhibit "an accumulation of years" of collective trauma and recovery.

"We've been waiting for an art show that deals with the Khmer Rouge period specifically. I would call this a 29-year process," he says.

"It is much more than an art exhibit because of the context in which it is taking place," he adds.

The "Art of Survival" coincides with efforts to bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to justice after nearly three decades.

Cambodia's genocide tribunal expects later this year to prosecute the first of five senior cadres currently in its custody in what many see as the biggest step yet towards the country's reconciliation with its brutal past.

The UN-backed court gives weight to the art. The art, in turn, is a tangible sign of Cambodia's emergence from beneath the shadow of the Khmer Rouge, says Meta House's director Nico Mesterharm.

"Art is a marker of development," says Mesterharm, a German documentary maker who has positioned his gallery at the forefront of Cambodia's cultural recovery.

"We see 'Art of Survival' as a platform for a community dialogue. We hope that our project contributes to the reconciliation process," he says.

Pol Pot artist links past to present with "Art of Survival"

PHNOM PENH Jan 28 (Reuters Life!) -- Cambodian artist Van Nath's talents saved his life in the 1970s, when he was forcibly put to work painting pictures of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

Now the artist, one of a handful of remaining survivors of the regime's notorious Tuol Sleng prison, hopes his latest works will expose the reality of Pol Pot's rule to a new generation.

On show at Phnom Penh gallery Meta House as part of the "Art of Survival" exhibition, his paintings of prison life are aimed at helping visitors deal with the trauma of the Khmer Rouge's 1974-1979 rule, when an estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died of starvation, torture or disease.

But they also hold a mirror up to the present, said Van Nath, throwing the treatment of Khmer Rouge officials currently on trial for crimes during Pol Pot's rule, including "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea, who has been linked to Tuol Sleng, into sharp relief.

"If I compare the prison where I was to Nuon Chea prison, it is very different. The prison at the Khmer Rouge court is very good. It has televisions, electricity, mattresses and they have enough food to eat," he told Reuters.

"At the prison where I was, I was in handcuffs 24 hours a day with no food and no medicine. Now even with today's good prisons, prisoners can still ask to be released on bail. They complain that they cannot stay there. But what about me and the nearly 20,000 people who were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng?" Van Nath said.

An estimated 17,000 to 20,000 Cambodians were crammed into Tuol Sleng, also called "Security Prison 21" or "S-21" under the Khmer Rouge, a black-shirted communist guerrilla movement who declared war on modernity after overrunning Phnom Penh in 1975.

They were ousted four years later by a Vietnamese invasion.

Of the tens of thousands accused of betraying the regime at Tuol Sleng, only a dozen are known to have made it out.

The plain three-storied high school building, in a quiet quarter of the capital, is now a public memorial site and museum.

It draws thousands of visitors every year, as do the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, about 15 kilometres (9 miles) out of the capital, where the remains of many of Tuol Sleng's victims are buried in mass graves.

But some worry the country has not yet processed the trauma of the Pol Pot years, even as high-profile trials of former officials, including Tuol Sleng's former governor, Khang Khekh Ieu, or "Duch", make their way through a United Nations tribunal.

This is where artists such as Van Nath can contribute, said Metahouse gallery owner Nicolas Mesterharm.

"The young generation we work with knows a little bit, so we try to educate them and we try to bring young and older artists together," German-born Mesterharm told Reuters.

"We try to address that issue of genocide and the Khmer Rouge atrocities through art within the society that has not learnt yet to speak openly about what happened 25 years ago," he said.

A number of international documentaries and films, such as the 1984 Oscar-winning "Killing Fields", have brought the country's violent past to international audiences.

And several memoirs written by survivors of the regime sell at tourist sites such as Angkor Wat in the country's north, and Phnom Penh.

But book sellers often say they have not read the English-language stories themselves.

For many young Cambodians, like student Sar Sayana, exhibitions such as the Art of Survival give a more accessible window to the past.

"It is important that these artist know what happened and that they made this exhibition so that others can know all about it too," she said, walking through the gallery.

(Reporting by Chantha Lach, Editing by Gillian Murdoch)