Artist Statement

Phnom Penh, Cambodia-based I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work is located at the nexus of aesthetic creativity and social justice. I am an accomplished photographer, sculptor, videographer and installation artist, as well as a site-specific performance artist. I am also a dedicated teacher, mentoring a new generation of visual artists to engage with their world with technical rigor, wonder and a critical eye. I was born in 1982 in Svay Rieng Province, Cambodia, and graduated from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, in 2006.

 

I attend, through my artistry, to urgent issues that impact the potential for individuals and communities to live lives of dignity, safety and fulfillment. Environmental degradation, including the complex influence of political and financial wrangling over the control of natural resources, the suppression of rights of indigenous communities, unchecked development, and systemic and other forms of violence, are among the urgent issues that propel my vision and creativity. I believe in the potency of dreams and omens, and of humor, to mediate these grave concerns.

 

In collaboration with discrete communities and/or other artists conversant in a range of genres, I commit to the development of relationships over the long-term, listening carefully to local perspectives and studying indigenous materials for possible use in an artistic project that might harness, for example, unresolved or even dangerous histories, or contentious and precarious contemporary experience. At times allegorical, abstract or playful, I have artistic expression constructs novel ways to conceive of such issues, and unveils embedded seats of power. I evoke possibilities for action – individual and communal — in the face of harsh inequities.