Sopheap Pich: The Pulse Within

It is with great pleasure that Tyler Rollins Fine Art presents Sopheap Pich’s first New York solo exhibition. Pich has been very active on the international stage in recent years, and he is now considered to be Cambodia’s most prominent contemporary artist. But although his works are now exhibited around the world, he remains firmly rooted in Cambodia. Its vibrant culture and often tragic history continue to inspire his work.

His exhibition for our gallery is a particularly personal one, as it is inspired by his childhood recollections of life during the Khmer Rouge period (1975-79). The physical and psychological hardships of this traumatic period were seared into the artist’s memory. With The Pulse Within, Pich has looked deep into himself – and also into the psyche of Cambodia – to investigate the troubling currents swirling beneath the surface of daily life.

Issues of time, memory, and the body are integral to Pich’s work. For this exhibition, he has created a dynamic group of sculptural forms derived from the internal organs of the human body, such as the heart, lungs, and intestines. These function as visceral reminders of the past and of the intimate, physical connections between human beings.

In a time when Cambodia and its people are focused on the realities of daily life and the challenges of economic development, Pich carves out a space of reflection upon the deeper issues that underlie Cambodian society. He returns to the fundamental physical basics of the human body, which he relates to the social body of the nation. Its internal scars and painfully raw wounds are exposed to view, and yet through this process some hope of healing is suggested.

This year has been an exciting one for Pich. In addition to completing a major outdoor sculptural installation at the King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, he is being featured in two of Asia’s most prestigious art events: the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Fukuoka, Japan; and the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia. We are very proud to introduce him to New York.
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CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE PULSE WITHIN 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 BY SOPHEAP PICH

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.

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Special thanks to Vandy Rattana for taking many of the photographs of the works for The Pulse Within exhibition catalogue.