Khmer Blue Has Purists Seeing Red

"Yak 2" - a drawing posted on reahu.net

A Cambodian-American artist has upset some of his countrymen with highly controversial paintings of mythical apsaras, a heavenly female figure.

11/01/2009
By Luke Hunt
Bangkok Post

At first glance it's obvious. Koke Lor's art has been inspired by the bare-breasted apsaras dancing across the stone walls of Angkor Wat and hundreds of other temples that dot the Cambodian landscape.

He has also taken great pleasure in adding a dash of colour, a smile and a relaxed pose to the ladies in his portraits. In doing so, this Khmer-American artist has breathed some fresh air into an art scene overwhelmed by tradition - and landed himself an inbox full of hate mail.

Cambodia's Minister for Women's Affairs, Ing Kantha Phavy, has drawn comparisons between Lor's art and pornography, telling Spectrum the paintings were a negative reflection of Cambodian culture, values and honour, and like pornography, it was a danger to local youths.

"Most Cambodian women have reacted against these paintings. They cannot accept these paintings," she said, adding the country's powerful Post and Telecommunications Ministry is investigating ways of shutting down Lor's website, reahu.net, named after the art collective of which he is a member.

Cambodia is commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Khmer Rouge this week. Pol Pot, widely renowned for his intolerance of beauty and the annihilation of Khmer culture and apsara dancing, was swept from power by the invading Vietnamese on Jan 7, 1979.

Ten years of Vietnamese occupation followed, and civil war continued until 1998, the year Pol Pot died.

However, the country has also had 11 years of peace and is enjoying a relatively prosperous period during which the arts and education are flourishing amid hopes that a more enlightened era is beckoning. But in Cambodia the killjoys in government are never too far away.

Chuch Phoeurn, the secretary of state for the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, said Lor, like any other artist, had the right to use his imagination, but warned: "It is wrong to paint in order to degrade Cambodian women or apsara dancers."

Essentially, an apsara is a heavenly female figure, or spirit, idolised within Hindu and Buddhist cultures, and any portrayal of the mythical women who serviced the courts of Khmer kings 1,000 years ago is to tinker with the foundations of a culture.

So, when Lor plucks a woman from the ranks of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, grants her a tasteful makeover and transforms a dowdy killer into an attractive apsara with a gun, everybody in Cambodia is going to have an opinion. Especially the likes of Tuol Sleng (the notorious S-21 prison) survivor Vann Nath, who simply said: "We are not happy with these kinds of paintings. They affect the feelings of the victims and do not reflect the truth of that era."

Such attitudes have turned Lor, himself a survivor of the Killing Fields, into something of a recluse.

"To be honest, it does intimidate me," he told Spectrum, "due to the threatening emails I've received.

"You know what people in high places are capable of doing, and they could also slap me with some kind of defamation charges."

When asked about the Khmer Rouge girl, he says: "Yes I did that one. It's my way of dealing with atrocity. I went through the ordeal and it was a painful childhood.

"When it comes to the Khmer Rouge, all you'll hear is bloodshed and the Killing Fields. I've just thrown in a 'What if?"'

Lor's knowledge of the Khmer Rouge is first-hand. As an eight-year-old he fled Cambodia with his family in 1979, as Pol Pot's iron grip over the country was nearing its end and the world began counting the almost two million left dead from the policies imposed by the ultra-Maoists.

The family moved to the US, where Lor earned a degree in engineering with a minor in fine art. He is single and now lives in Chicago where he established a small art collective known as reahu.net with two other Khmer-Americans, Bong T and Chronicle.

"That is how they would like to be known. They are great tattoo artists," Lor said.

Unbeknown to most, Lor spent the 30th anniversary of Pol Pot's overthrow in Cambodia, where he sized-up the reaction to his work, and while there was no shortage of outraged puritans, there was also plenty of support from the local art scene, which readily praised his portraits.

Author Theary Seng, who wrote Daughter of the Killing Fields and is also executive director of the Centre for Social Development in Cambodia, was blunt in her appraisal: "I love it! I want to buy some for my apartment!

"It's exquisitely beautiful in it's celebration of the human body and an adherence to how apsaras were then - naked as depicted.

"His work builds Khmer culture, it doesn't destroy it," she said.

Ms Seng also reserved a few choice words for the critics.

"We are such a hypocritical and blind society to beauty; we call white, black and black, white; we trade the genuine for the synthetic.

"The naysayers tend to be those who appoint themselves as the guardians of Khmer culture, but their response is really just a knee-jerk reaction, and they have limited understanding and appreciation of beauty, aesthetics and culture," she said.

The Cambodian Centre for Human Rights has also taken up Reahu's cause and urged the government to forsake censorship and asked it not to block the Reahu website.

Meanwhile, Peg LeVine from the Melbourne-Phnom Penh based Monash Asia Institute said Lor and Reahu had struck a justifiable chord of restlessness in Cambodian society.

She said the images held a sensual beauty that was beyond question, but added: "It is not the images, per se, that are at issue here. Rather it is the vehemence by which he 'uses' if not abuses the ancestral and culturally-embedded meanings of the apsara."

In this sense she adds the artists associated with Reahu could be proving themselves to be more American-Khmer than Khmer-American.

Writing in the Phnom Penh Post, the French-Cambodian author Somanos Sar said the public outrage over Reahu was more about limits on freedom, rights and responsibilities.

"I would suggest to him that he paint a female Nazi fighter in the same way he has painted the female Khmer Rouge fighter. Maybe he could then feel the frontiers between freedom and responsibility."

Lor is unrepentant and wants Cambodians to look beyond the four walls of home, arguing that at the end of the day pictures cannot damage a culture that is confident in itself.

But given the years of destruction, a notorious culture of impunity and corruption across most levels of Cambodia's bureaucracies and institutions, few would argue that this country's culture is on solid ground.

The government has also proved adept at meddling in the social and private lives of its citizens.

At various times Western music and dance have been banned, curfews imposed, women told to wear skirts below the knee, adultery is an imprisonable offence despite the well-known dalliances of politicians, and marriage between local women and foreigners is regulated.

Lor also told Spectrum that he had considered staging an exhibition of his work in Cambodia, but had decided against it in favour of keeping it on the internet, at least in the short term.

"I don't think Cambodia is ready for it yet. Maybe in the future when things have calmed down, or when they have grown to accept my work, but it has been a great experience - I will be back here next year to see if my art is more acceptable."

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.