Sopheap Pich

Sopheap Pich is Cambodia’s most prominent contemporary artist. Working primarily with bamboo and rattan, he creates free-flowing, biomorphic sculptures and installations that address issues of time, memory, and the body, often relating to his childhood recollections of life during the Khmer Rouge period (1975-79).

Pich’s works were seen for the first time in New York in a solo exhibition, The Pulse Within, at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in November and December 2009. That was an exciting year for Pich: in addition to completing a major outdoor sculptural installation at the King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, he was featured in two of Asia’s most prestigious art events, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (Fukuoka, Japan) and the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, Australia).

In 2010, Pich’s work was featured in Classic Contemporary: Contemporary Southeast Asian Art from the Singapore Art Museum Collection, and in a solo exhibition in Cambodia. He was commissioned to create a major sculptural installation, Compound, for the 2011 Singapore Biennial, where it was exhibited in the rotunda of the National Museum. Compound will be presented as a re-configured installation for Pich’s solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington (November 10, 2011 – April 1, 2012). The work will subsequently will be included in a group exhibition at MASS MoCA, entitled Invisible Cities (April 14, 2012 – March 1, 2013).

Pich is currently a featured artist in the 2011 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan (October 1, 2011 – January 1, 2012) and is preparing for a major biennial next year. He recently created a large-scale metal sculpture, Chrysalis, for a project in China, and his work appeared in the group exhibition, Here / Not Here: Buddha Presence in Eight Recent Works, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Pich will present a solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art from November 3 – December 23, 2011.
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CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE PULSE WITHIN EXHIBITION CATALOGUE ESSAY BY BORETH LY.
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CLICK HERE FOR AN ARTIST TALK WITH PICH FROM THE 2009 ASIA-PACIFIC TRIENNIAL.
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ARTIST STATEMENT, 2011

When I was in Chicago, my professor Ray Yoshida used to say to me: “If you think you should do it, you should do it. You do it just to see what happens…to see what happens.”

Ray was always telling me in our weekly meetings of how things were only possible if we were to invest time into our studio and just work. He was always looking to see as much work as possible so he could start talking and making connections from what was actually in front of us. Like all great teachers, he always seemed to arrive with a bag full of ideas, but what made every meeting so interesting was that he always had so many things to say about any one thing that I did.

With this new series of work for my second show at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, I started with one work, one big work I made of the morning glory plant. I didn’t know how big it was going to be or how long it was going to take to make it. I figured I had a little over a year to come up with the show, and I have a handful of assistants to help me, so if I can finish this one piece first, I would be all right in the end. Even though I’ve been working this same way since I started making sculpture seven years ago, I’m still never sure how long it takes to make anything. Of course I have more help now than I did then, but I’ve always approach every work with that sense of not knowing when or how it will turn out in the end. In the West, this way of working is nothing new, but in Cambodia this is seen as a negative thing. You always have to plan things out ahead of time. Anything that is improvisational can’t possibly be any good, as it doesn’t have any planning before it – “think before you draw” as the common saying goes. The reality is that it’s a bit scary to work this way.
And then there’s that decision to make a sculpture of a plant, a sort of plant on the bottom of Asia’s food hierarchy. Should I have chosen a more noble plant? There are all those flowers, or maybe the rice. Everyone knows lotus is very noble; it’s used in all the ceremonies, and the Buddha is seen walking on them in those paintings in the pagodas. In fact, that’s what people often call my morning glory: “I love it! What a beautiful lotus!”

Recently, my mother told me a story of someone in Arizona who went to the hospital because he or she got poisoned from eating morning glory, and now that state banned it from being sold or planted. But Cambodians there are still eating it, she said. I said maybe someone looked on the internet and found some seeds and ingested hundreds of them and got “poisoned,” but in fact “hallucinated”. I told her I found that information when doing a little research on the plant. Or maybe they got food poisoning from MSG or bad shrimp – but she said she didn’t know exactly. In any case, the plant is banned. Anyway, I’ve never heard or seen this plant taking over anything or anywhere. I remember it kept us alive in the ‘70s.

Another sculpture that took a few people by surprise is the Seated Buddha. If paintings of transparently dressed teenage girls with water jugs, sunny rice fields with a couple of huts under palm trees, and Angkor Vat are clichés in Cambodian paintings, then this particular Buddha is also the most popular image of the Buddha in sculpture. I chose to make the same meditative pose Buddha in rattan, using the same approach as all my works before. I made him as tall as my studio ceiling would allow, so he’s about 2.5 meters tall on the pedestal.

It’s not the first time I’ve make a Buddha sculpture, but it is my first “realistic” Buddha as I tried to copy the best I could a small bronze version I had sitting on my shelf. Again, I didn’t know for sure what he’d end up looking like. For sure, he was not intended to look like what I’m showing here. I thought I would “do something,” “change something,” or “add something” to him at some point or at the end. But when it came to the end, I had decided that that was enough. He didn’t need anything more or less. He was a beautiful sculpture. I visited a good friend in Phnom Penh at his house for the first time. He’s a doctor, originally from Germany, and he had a couple of cabinets full of little Buddha statues from all over the world. All of them looked very different from each other but with nothing really added to them. They were mostly old and many were missing body parts, etc. as all antiques go. Everybody must have seen all the Buddhas with different poses: some under a tree, some on a lotus, some under a serpent, etc., etc. To me, they were all so beautiful and special. At that point, I thought maybe more Buddha sculptures would be coming my way in the future.

Through many conversations with people over the years, they often said to me: ”That sounds very Buddhist what you are saying.” Or they would ask me if I was a Buddhist. I would tell them that I was born into a Buddhist culture and a Buddhist family, and I had read a few books on the subject, and I find what the Buddha was written to stand for correlated well with the day-to-day living. I often think that Buddhist teaching is very much in tune with nature, as I understand it. I am young and still have much, much more to learn about nature, but for the time being, his teaching seems to me the closest to the laws of nature. I am inspired by nature and try to live my life as best I can with nature, but I’m continually fighting with my animal nature…etc., etc.

But I don’t go to temples. I live near a temple. In fact I think everyone in Cambodia lives near a temple. You can almost say the whole country is like a temple, as there’s always sound blaring out of them every couple of weeks. And if its not coming out of them, similar sounds would be coming out of somebody’s house when their children get married or when someone passes away, along with numerous other ceremonies that people make.

My studio is my temple, and when I travel, my sketchbook and my laptop are my portable temples.

And what about the other works in the show? I think they are points of possibilities, experiments of inclinations, results of my search for meanings of home maybe. Cocoons can be like temporary homes, or fragile interiors (I am using beeswax mixed with earth from Mondulkiri province and Hong Kong for these). Other tubular wall hangings are made with wax, damar crystals (encaustics) mixed with earth powder from Kampong Saom, collected from my recent trips. They are like growths of some kind or maybe rivers or lakes seen from the airplane. The Reliefs are another point of departure. They reference paintings (I studied painting in the US) in that they are flat and hung on the wall. But here I wanted to make paintings from scratch (not relying on the conventional canvas on stretchers) and play with these other earth powders and charcoal (which we use for cooking at the studio). So they are basically done the exact same way I do the sculptures. I think of them all as results of conversations between structure and materials. I asked them what they wanted to be. And I thought about what Ray said: “…Just to see what happens.”

Phnom Penh
October 23, 2011
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*ARTIST STATEMENT, 2009 *

At the end of 2002, I decided to return to Cambodia for the first time since fleeing the country with my family in 1979. I was born in Koh Kralaw, a rice-farming town in Battambang Province, in northwestern Cambodia, but during the Khmer Rouge regime, my family and I were moved to different towns and villages in the province. We ended up in refugee camps in Thailand before settling in the United States. It was there that I began my studies, going on to receive a BFA in Painting at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Back in Cambodia, I had several exhibitions of paintings over the next couple of years. Then in 2004, I made my first rattan sculpture of a pair of lungs, which I had intended to cover with cigarette packages. But, after having taken advice from the director of the French Cultural Center at the time, I decided against it. That piece opened a totally new approach to my art practice, and I have continued to make works using rattan, bamboo, and metal wire ever since. At the end of 2005, I stopped painting completely. I felt at that point that painting was not enough, that I was too concerned with making an image on a limited space. To create a three-dimensional object from the beginning to the end is to take a journey, to discover something new without erasing the footsteps, the evidence. It was not very practical, as my objects tended to be large, and there are other issues that come with working with natural materials – but characteristically, each successful work has a life in it that is somehow a reflection of where it comes from.

Most of the forms I started using were of human organs: the liver, lungs, stomach, etc. I was not interested so much in copying the form but rather in finding something else in it or something else it could become – or rather some meaning it could suggest. Hive, for example, started out as a liver but became a kind of corridor and stood vertically on the floor. One could walk in and out of it. For Cycle, I connected two stomachs together to suggest a kind of movement or family ties, old to young again. Many other works, such as Stalk and Upstream, were not inspired by the body but by nature and culture. Ripple was born out of the process of making sculpture itself – of wanting to “see what happens.” In the end, all the works had the thread of common meaning: that of poverty, inside/outside ambiguity, fragility, monumentality, lightness, of strength by way of holding on to each other with simple means.

The whole process is completely hand-made, so there were imperfections, from the cutting of the rattan strands to the distance of the grids. I still go to the countryside to cut my own bamboo. I rarely use rulers or measuring tape – only at the end in order to know the size of the work. Although I have a particular idea before I start, I rely more on instinct than a specific plan as a way to work.

In 2003, I formed a small artist group called Saklapel (a play on the Khmer word Sel’pak, which means “arts”). Two years later, the group organized a big exhibition in the capital, Phnom Penh, called Visual Art Open. Many people considered this an important event because it brought a lot of press, and we had a fairly comprehensive website which opened doors for many of the artists involved. The year after, I started a small art center, Sala Art Space, with Dana Langlois, who owns the well-known Java Café (where I had my first solo show in 2003). I guided a kind of theoretical class for a group of ten young artists. Most are still showing their works today. After about one year, the center folded, and as my work was beginning to attract different shows and residencies, I retreated from the art scene and dedicated my time fully to my work.

In the past year I have been working on two different bodies of work for two exhibitions: one at the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia; and the other at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York City. For Australia, I have done an installation, entitled 1979, that contains eleven sculptural objects made predominantly with bamboo, rattan, and burlap, along with five carved wooden buffaloes. In this work, I wanted to tell a story of a time in my childhood just at the end of the Khmer Rouge period. My memory is very strong about growing up in that time, so I have many stories based on factual events. But as I get older, they have become more and more allegorical, or I am finding in them meanings and ideas that inform my understanding and my relationship to present-day Cambodia. So this group of sculptures is an attempt to visually describe what I, as a child on that particular journey, had experienced.

The second body of work, for the New York exhibition, is more of a continuation with what has been my preoccupation since I started making sculptures – the attempt to reveal certain aspects of the socio-political condition of Cambodia. In this respect, my feelings in the past five years have not changed much, so some of the works still bear similarities to the early works. At the same time, new questions began to appear, and so new steps or experiments were taken: I began to use other materials – burlaps, farm tools, wood, plastic, paints, etc. There was a need to put a more distinct “subject matter” in the objects.

In and around Phnom Penh at the moment, there is much development – new high rises are going up, bridges are being built, land is being sold at unimaginable prices, traffic is getting impossible on the main boulevards as cars are getting bigger, and car dealers are popping up on every major junction.

How did these things get here? What have we produced that is so profitable? The last time I heard, we are still one of those countries in the world where the vast majority of the population still survives on about one dollar a day. What do we consume on a dollar a day? What do those products with the label “For Export Only” mean? It was recently in the news that some chopstick makers were found to be using a certain anti-fungus chemical to keep their chopsticks from attracting molds. Since everything has to be cheap, nothing can be wasted. How do we know if what we are consuming is real since most of it is not even made here? And are those shiny cars really new cars?

In the countryside, along the national borders, people collect old military remnants to sell as scrap metal. Everyday people push huge carts of junk materials across the borders to be recycled. Cambodia was one of the most heavily mined countries during the late 1960s, and many bombs were dropped but did not explode. We often heard news of people who got maimed or died while trying to disassemble these objects. For many people along the borders, this is one way to make a living. On the Thai-Cambodian border, carts and tricycles filled with all kinds of scrap materials are pushed and pulled by handicapped people every day to sell to Thai factories.

Now, when I see the new high rises and shiny buildings being constructed, I can’t help but think about what the materials were. And when I see the workers building the buildings, it is as though I’m looking at the same people who scavenge for metals.

Cambodia is a complex place, a hard place – and for me also an inspiring place. It informs my work. It gives it a sense of place. I call this latest group of works The Pulse Within to indicate that it is my exploration of the underlying aspects of the country. It is also a continuation of my search for new forms and new meanings, testing the limit of what I know as a person and as an artist.
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SILENCE AND CYCLE:
ARTIST STATEMENT BY SOPHEAP PICH

Cycle was one of my earliest works as sculptor. In fact it was the second one after the breakthrough piece called Silence, a small set of lungs done with rattan and steel wire.

I was painting at that time and was getting ready for the group show at the French Cultural Center in Phnom Penh. It was my third year back in Cambodia, and I felt the need to make works that were more accessible by Cambodian people. My paintings were too limited. Because health was a major issue of people around me, forms of the human organs as a starting point seemed obvious.

The process of making Silence felt like I was tracing back to my childhood – figuring out how to make things to use and play with. Along with problem solving came also that reflective moment: a sense of joy and adventure in working slowly and repetitively, and trusted that it would lead somewhere. Rattan and wire were chosen because both were around and cheap and required very few, simple, hand tools. It also taught me something about art, as I had never understood before. There was a sense of truth and completeness in the simple, imperfect skeletal forms of the lungs. The director of the French Cultural Center told me that it gave him goose-bumps looking at it.

After finishing Silence, I wanted to make a piece whereby all the technical problems I would encounter would be solved. It needed to be large enough that I would understand what it would take, physically and time-wise, to make a work.

A major issue in Cambodia, as I knew it, has always been the stomach. It was either that everyone’s concern was to fill it or to cure its diseases. Cycle took the shape of a stomach as a starting point to symbolize society in general. Connecting two stomachs together then suggested ideas of strong family ties or a society held together by simple means. It was also about fragility, controlled chaos, movement, and the ambiguity of the interior and the exterior. So there were questions about identity: am I inside? or outside?

When displayed correctly, Cycle has that kind of suggestive tendencies. But it remains a sculpture; it doesn’t try to tell a story. It appears both strong and tragic at the same time. It’s humble and occupies its space. It’s monumental yet is easily shaken by a slight gust of wind.

That sense of being open yet able to hold one’s own, was a good space for me as an artist to work in. Cycle then, is a major work because it changed my understanding about what it takes to make works and what it means to be an artist. People gravitate to it, and it’s been published by numerous local and international publications, including a sculpture dictionary being arranged in France. A larger version of it in bronze is being built for the King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia by the foundry, Urban Art Projects, in Brisbane. Cycle is a defining piece from me up to this point.