Sopheap Pich’s 2012 Seated Buddha—Abhaya Mudra, made of bamboo and rattan, greets visitors to the UMMA exhibit Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia. The eighty pieces within speak to the Cambodian people’s losses to French colonization and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, whose bloody attempt to create a rural, classless society cost an estimated 1.5 million lives between 1975 and 1979.
Shorty, 28, shows his Killing Fields tattoo, Philadelphia, PA. Photo by Pete Pin, part of the “Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia” exhibit at UMMA running through July 28.
Many of the pieces were created by survivors. Amy Lee Sanford was sent to a foster family in the U.S. for safety shortly before her parents were killed. Her 2015 Full Circle displays forty utilitarian Cambodian clay pots in a circle on the floor, each intentionally broken, glued back together, and connected by twine. War survivor Vandy Rattana’s 2009 Bomb Ponds photo series shows the enormous craters created by U.S. bombings during the Vietnam War that are now water-filled ponds with returning plant life. Refugee Pete Pin’s 2011 photo of the “Killing Fields” tattoo on a survivor’s hands memorializes the labor camps where men, women, and children were tortured, slaughtered, and dumped in mass graves—a lifelong never-forget message. Among the regime’s targets were artists, Buddhist monks, and traditional women Apsara dancers. The Apsara Warrior sculpture (Ouk Chim Vichet, 2004) is a crouching woman made of parts of Khmer Rouge fighters’ AK-47 and M-16 rifles.
Part of the story of Cambodia is the looting of antiquities since the early nineteenth century and in more than 4,000 temples during and after the war. Sold to wealthy private citizens and museums, they are slowly being repatriated through a global effort. Leang Seckon’s 2016 mixed-media piece, Dead and Reborn Again, shows two images of Harihara, the dual representation of Hindu deities Vishnu and Shiva—one with its head separated from its body, the other restored. It refers to the repatriation from France of the head of a seventh-century sculpture of the deity to be reunited with its body in Cambodia.
Those who visit this compelling exhibit will be rewarded with rich artwork that speaks to the heritage, genocide, diaspora, and repatriation of the Cambodian people. The visceral reaction to the themes of the work and the skill of the artists is made even more powerful by the story of their creation. The exhibit runs through July 28 at UMMA.