SOUTH EAST ASIA CONTEMPORARY ART
Art · Performance · Phnom Penh
Khvay
Samnang
Performance, ritual and the body as protest. A Cambodian artist working at the intersection of land, politics and six hundred years of animist knowledge.
Why this conversation
I first encountered Khvay Samnang's work at Tally Beck Contemporary in New York, in an exhibition called "On the Threshold of the Senses: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia," curated by the Bangkok-based critic and curator Brian Curtin. The show brought together nearly two dozen works from Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and it was one of those rare group exhibitions where the political and the spiritual existed in the same frame without competing. Samnang's work stayed with me. His response to the displacement of Cambodian communities caused by land privatization was visceral and ancient at the same time: the body performing resistance in the landscape, ritual as a form of mapping what has been lost.
I believe in the potency of dreams and omens, and of humor, to mediate grave concerns.
Khvay SamnangThe Artist
Khvay Samnang was born in 1982 in Svay Rieng Province, Cambodia, and graduated from the Painting Department at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, where he lives and works today. He is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, film and video, photography, sculpture and installation, with a practice rooted at the intersection of aesthetic creativity and social justice.
His work attends to urgent issues that impact the potential for individuals and communities to live lives of dignity, safety and fulfilment: environmental degradation, the suppression of rights of indigenous communities, unchecked development, and the complex influence of political and financial control over natural resources. Each body of work is built on thorough research and the investigation of local specificities, structures and conditions.
To grasp his universe, one must accept letting go of conventional boundaries: between human and non-human, between the visible and the spiritual, between art and ritual. His conviction is that colonization and globalization have broken something far more fragile than forests or land. They have severed the connection between communities and the systems of knowledge that have structured them for centuries.
The Chong and the Cardamom Mountains
Central to Samnang's recent practice is a long-term collaboration with the Chong, an animist people established for more than six hundred years in the Cardamom Mountains in southwestern Cambodia. From these immersions emerge objects: masks woven from vines and raw materials, organic costumes, hybrid sculptures combining natural and industrial elements. These are not representations. They are presences.
In collaboration with discrete communities and other artists, he commits to the development of relationships over the long term, listening carefully to local perspectives and studying indigenous materials. At times allegorical, abstract or playful, his artistic expression constructs novel ways to conceive of displacement and ecological loss, and unveils embedded seats of power. He evokes possibilities for action, individual and communal, in the face of harsh inequities.
Colonization and globalization have broken the connection between communities and the land that shaped them.
On Khvay Samnang's practiceThe Exhibition
"On the Threshold of the Senses" at Tally Beck Contemporary brought together artists responding to the charged landscapes of Southeast Asia: Samnang and the Indonesian collective Taring Padi addressed the displacement of communities through performance and agitprop, Kriangkrai Kongkhanun confronted viewers with a Buddhist vision of hell, and Ohm Phanphiroj created disturbingly beautiful photographs of teenage male sex workers in Thailand. The exhibition, curated by Brian Curtin, offered views across photography, drawing, woodcut print and multimedia sculpture from Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
Find Khvay Samnang
- Artist website: khvaysamnang.com
- Artist statement: khvaysamnang.com/artist-statement
- On Artsy: artsy.net/artist/khvay-samnang
- On Kadist: kadist.org
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Still from On the Threshold of the Senses exhibition
