Art of Survival

Democratic Kampuchea was one of the worst human tragedies of the 20th century. Nearly two million Cambodians died from diseases due to a lack of medicines and medical services, starvation, execution, or exhaustion from overwork. Tens of thousands were made widows and orphans, and those who lived through the regime were severely traumatized by their experiences. Several hundred thousand Cambodians fled their country and became refugees. Millions of mines were laid by the Khmer Rouge and government forces, which have led to thousands of deaths and disabilities since the 1980s.

The Cold War killed any prospect of a tribunal. Justice was all but frozen for decades –until 2006. In that year, the UN-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal (ECCC) was finally established in Phnom Penh. Coinciding with the trial, our project Art of Survival (AOS) began in January 2008 with 21 artists and expanded in October 2008 to include a total of 40 artists, who were each given a blank canvas to document their reflections on the Khmer Rouge period. Among them were a few international artists such as Vietnamese-Khmer painter Le Huy Hoang, Americans Rodney Dickson and Bradford Edwards, Francis Wittenberger (Israel) or Herbert Mueller (Germany).

Cambodian female artist Oeur Sokuntevy was born after the atrocities of Pol Pot’s regime in 1983. So when she was asked to produce an artwork for an exhibition looking back at that period, she struggled; Pol Pot and the legacy of his rule are not discussed much by her generation. In the end, Oeur painted “I Am Too Young to Understand These Words,” a watercolor of a young girl in a bathing suit talking on her mobile phone beside a phrase reproduced from Pol Pot’s “Little Red Book,” extolling the regime’s aims. Her painting stood in sharp contrast to “The Khmer Rouge Leader,” a painting by Hen Sophal, born 1958, who depicts a grinning Pol Pot seated like an emperor atop a mountain of bones and skulls. In this regard, AOS was a “long-overdue dialogue through art”. Works artists from different generations were representing the divergent perspectives of Cambodians on Pol Pot and his killing fields.

The highly popular AOS exhibitions at Meta House and Bophana Center were accompanied by the intercultural dialogue project “Underground” (with German artists Horst Hoheisel and Sebastian Brand, funded by the Goethe Institute), and a series of speaker events at Pannasastra High School in Phnom Penh. In 2009, the Art of Survival traveling exhibition, funded by DED (German Development Services) took a selection of artworks to Cambodian villages. “To us it makes perfect sense to approach these darkest years in Cambodian history through visual arts as the Khmer Rouge forbade everything which was related to creativity and freedom in music, visual, and performing arts”, said German co-curator Lydia Parusol in an interview with the US “Newsweek” magazine. “Cambodia’s artists, who influenced the Southeast Asian subcontinent in the 60s, died or fled into exile. In recent years, Cambodia’s art scene has blossomed again and Meta House is a part of that.”