Generation Return: Art and Justice Tour aims to break Cambodian stereotypes

by Janet Smith 
Apr 10, 2013

A Cambodian-American artist who has returned to live in Phnom Penh is hitting Vancouver on a tour aimed at breaking cultural stereotypes about her homeland.

Anida Yoeu Ali brings free performances of her interdisciplinary Generation Return: Art and Justice Tour to the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts’ Royal Bank Cinema next Thursday (April 18) from 5 to 6:30 p.m., and to Emily Carr University next Friday (April 19) from 7 to 9 p.m.

“There’s a really polarizing image of Cambodia: it’s either one of temples or of trauma, of grave war-torn poverty,” says Ali, who found a contemporary-art renaissance—from hip-hop to cinema—surging in her home country when she first returned to it on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2011. “Cambodia is moving at such an exciting, fast speed in terms of rapid urbanization and globalization. The stability has brought a renewed interest in understanding what the Cambodian identity is, and people are interested in telling a different narrative.”

She and her husband, Masahiro Sugano, have set up an independent, artist-run media lab called the Studio Revolt in the capital, where they create work and reach out to other artists. Ali’s own practice is influenced by some of the sociopolitical issues she sees around her, specifically the Cambodian-American deportees who have committed minor crimes in the U.S. and been shipped back to live in a country they have no memory of.

In her shows here, Ali says, she’ll perform spoken-word poetry that speaks to being Cambodian-American and what it means to return to Cambodia, alongside videos from her work with the Studio Revolt. An overriding theme is justice: the justice that was never received as Cambodia attempted to prosecute the Khmer Rouge members who committed genocide on its people; but also the injustice in what Ali describes as the secondary “act of violence” of deportation. “Through the presentation I hope to ask the question to a wider audience about what is contemporary justice for the Cambodian diaspora,” says Ali, who feels strongly about art as a tool for activism.

The artist, who has also moved her two young children to Phnom Penh, still marvels at her new life in the country her parents escaped after being trapped there during the genocide. “Living there—it’s so crazy for me,” Ali says. “It’s a deep blessing and a dream come true for me to live in a city that once was home for my father. He was a teacher, and for me to be raising my kids there, where he used to bicycle around, is really surreal.”

She says the first time she took a trip to the country, she was blown away by the beauty and richness of its culture. “Growing up in America, my parents didn’t feel that they needed to teach us Cambodian,” she explains. “They felt like their culture was gone. But of course, three decades later, who knew that things would be so different?”