Battambang is at the cutting edge of Cambodia’s new art scene. Claire Knox finds a pretty, sleepy city waking up to its creative potential
The resemblance is rather striking. With his dark hair swept to the side and bee-stung lips, Cambodian painter Chov Theanly is often told he’s the dapper doppelganger of the country’s most well-known crooner, the late Sinn Sisamouth, the Frank Sinatra of Cambodia during the 60s, the country’s golden age.
When Khmer Rouge soldiers marched through Cambodia’s cities in 1975, sending its people to oppressive labour camps, film stars and musicians were some of the brutal regime’s first targets and, like many of his peers, Sisamouth disappeared.
But today, almost 40 years later, the arts are thriving once again, and no more so than in Battambang, a dreamy, peaceful city between the capital Phnom Penh and tourist mecca Siem Reap. While construction has rocketed along at breakneck speeds elsewhere, Battambang has, despite being the country’s second-largest city, remained relatively untainted by tourism and mass development. The Sankae river snakes through town, while rice fields, leafy villages and glittering pagodas halo around its edges.
I meet 28-year-old Theanly at a small, artist-run space called Sammaki in the middle of town for an informal art tour. A graphic designer and painter who works from a cool, airy attic above his father’s Chinese shophouse on the riverbank, Theanly is one of a wave of home-grown artists enjoying recent success – his exhibition, entitled Surviving, sold out on its opening night in Phnom Penh last year.
“Everything is just very open and creative and collaborative in Battambang,” he tells me. “There’s an honesty here.”
Perhaps at the core of the city’s artistic revival is the visual arts centre Phare Ponleu Selpak. The sprawling arts school teaches visual, applied and performing arts, provides a formal state education curriculum for almost 1,000 students and welcomes tourists through its gates almost every day of the year, with a circus troupe performance twice a week in the bright big top tent. Phare’s visual arts graduates are now opening their own contemporary art galleries, studios and workshops, and we visit artist-curator Mao Soviet who runs Make Maek, and the newly opened artist-collective space called Studio Art Battambang. It’s a cavernous old shophouse that exhibits large, bamboo sculptures and huge canvases. We pop next door to refuel at Kinyei, a social enterprise cafe with probably the best coffee in Cambodia (try a piccolo or a “Cambodian street latte” with palm sugar and orange essence).
On Theanly’s suggestion I head to another social enterprise eatery for dinner, the innovative Jaan Bai, on Street 2. With Bangkok-based celebrity chef David Thompson involved in the set-up and menu design, it’s a fun spot to unwind – local artists were commissioned to create a huge, psychedelic mural on the restaurant’s outside wall and the menu is designed for sharing. Head chef Mohm trained intensively with Thompson at the Bangkok Nahm and the menu reflects this – there’s a delicious Thai green curry, a finger-licking good dish of crab from the seaside hamlet Kep with Kampot pepper with chilli jam and a fiery kick. Cocktails have a Khmer twist – try the dragonfruit caipirinha and the lemongrass bloody mary.
Besides the contemporary art scene, Battambang’s striking architecture adds to its allure. To the north of town lies the magnificent Sala Khaet, the old Governor’s Residence. In 1905 the last Thai “lord governor”, Chhum Aphaiwong, hired Italian architects to erect this sweeping European-style palace. Elsewhere, French colonial villas and art deco structures rub shoulders with striking modernist “New Khmer” buildings erected during the 1960s.
.jpg "Former actor Khai Prosit wants to adopt boy tortured by two men in Prey Veng")
