Performing artists are moving beyond classical Khmer dance (photo: Mike).
Liam Cochrane reported this story on Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Listen to the audio at Australia's ABC Radio.
ELIZABETH JACKSON: Hello I'm Elizabeth Jackson and this is a radio current affairs documentary. When you think of the Asian nation of Cambodia, you might think of ancient temples, rice paddies, the Khmer Rouge and the years of civil war in the '80s and '90s.
There are still plenty of tales of hardship and poverty in Cambodia, but there's also a booming tourism industry and a young population keen to embrace the modern world. The influences of America and Korea might be prominent in popular culture but Cambodia has a small but growing contemporary arts movement of its own.
Liam Cochrane reports.
OEUR SOKUNTEVY: For the local Khmer, I think maybe they don't know about artists at all. I tell them I'm an artist, I'm drawing, and they think maybe I'm architecture or something. But it's just step by step, one day they might see.
DANA LANGLOIS: The desire is there. The intention is there. The passion, the drive, it's all there. But there's this lack of resources, lack of tools, lack of language, there's a lack of so many things that kind of stalls or stagnates that process in many cases, but not all.
SUON BUN RITH: Without all this new energy, and then the culture will stop and culture cannot stop. It has to go, has to continue.
LIAM COCHRANE: 1975 was Year Zero for Cambodia. The ultra-Communist Khmer Rouge wanted to turn the country into a peasant utopia, where everyone but the top leaders planted rice and constructed huge reservoirs.
Intellectuals became the enemy. Any art that didn't serve the party was outlawed and in just three brutal years, the nation's artists were all but wiped out.
Years of war and struggle followed and art was far from a priority. But in recent years, a contemporary arts scene has been growing in Cambodia. One of those who has nurtured the budding visual arts movement is Dana Langlois, owner of Java Arts Cafe. I catch her at the cafe as she's heading out to see a young Cambodian artist.
Dana, you've been around the Cambodian arts scene for a long time. As we travel in this tuk-tuk along the streets to another studio, tell me how you first came to be here and involved in Cambodia's art scene.
DANA LANGLOIS: OK I first arrived in '98. I came as a volunteer. And of course I did my, I stayed for a year doing that and then I ended up meeting the man who's the love of my life and that's what actually prompted me to stay initially.
And then after that, so in 2000 I actually started the cafe and gallery, seeing a need for some cultural expression here, something in the contemporary realm. And so I wanted to bring this space that would make it available for artists to use. And so basically that's how it was born. At the time the cafe was, and it still is, a great way to bring an audience into the work.
LIAM COCHRANE: And just briefly can you tell us a little bit about the artist that we're going to visit now?
DANA LANGLOIS: So we're going to meet Oeur Sokuntevy, usually called Tevy, 'cause that's the short form of her name. She's this great artist I've been working with through Java Arts through the last several years, we've been working together at least six years.
She, what's exciting about her work is that she's very bold, very honest and completely unabashed about her approach to her work. I've often referred to her as our one-woman sexual revolution. She's just completely open and she's turning on its head these notions of what is expected of women in Cambodian society, very powerful.
LIAM COCHRANE: And Dana, I've travelled in a lot of tuk-tuks in Cambodia but I've never travelled in one that has a painting hanging from the front of the tuk-tuk. Did you plan that? Did you organise this in advance?
DANA LANGLOIS: No! Actually I was quite impressed with that as well. This tuk-tuk, Chea, he's actually one of my employees and he's been a great asset to the company and a good team member. Anyhow, I'm hoping somewhere that he's actually been influenced by the gallery.
LIAM COCHRANE: Java Gallery has played an important role in fostering talent and providing a place for shows. Ten years ago, it was just Java and the French Cultural Center. But now there's a dozen galleries and studios dotted around Phnom Penh.
Such exposure brings opportunities for artists like Tevy, who, when we visit, is putting the finishing touches on a large oil painting that will be shipped off to an art auction in Singapore.
LIAM COCHRANE: Can we get through here?
DANA LANGLOIS: Yeah we can go through here. Last time they told me to go through their house... Hello?
LIAM COCHRANE: Tell me about your background in arts, how did you start painting and working as an artist?
OEUR SOKUNTEVY: I'm from Battambang. I draw all of the time after finished school, about 2007 I had a show and then I moved to Phnom Penh to be an artist and keep moving, keep drawing. In the first show I do only 20 small painting but later now I see many thing change in Cambodia and I change too [laughs].
LIAM COCHRANE: And tell us what you're working on. Tell us perhaps this picture leaning up against the wall here that's been completed. Tell us about that work?
OEUR SOKUNTEVY: It's all about the human and animal are related. We are human as the animal, you know, I don't know how to explain
LIAM COCHRANE: As you collect your thoughts and think about how to explain let me describe for people who can't see it. We've got a very bright, brightly coloured painting here on a canvas about two metres by one metre and it appears to be a human/animal figure in front of a mirror having his or her, I presume her, head done. Tell us a bit more about it.
OEUR SOKUNTEVY: This one is a happen a lot in the markets and the woman usually go to the market and washing hair and I don't draw look like a normal people who washing hair at the market I just use animal instead of people.
LIAM COCHRANE: It looks like a monkey right?
OEUR SOKUNTEVY: Yeah it's a monkey. It's a monkey who washing hair and elephant doing for her.
LIAM COCHRANE: It looks like some kind of body building, very muscly elephant who's doing the washing of the hair.
OEUR SOKUNTEVY: Yes, kind of a gay elephant or something. It's just fun, I just tried to make a joke of it. What I think it's like right now, a woman many people use a lot of cosmetic, you know, try to make themselves look beautiful and try to be like a model/woman. Now they use the contact lens with the eyes, it's the Asian but they try to look like the European, they try to look slim, look nice and spend a lot of money on that. But for me I don't think it's useful.
(Music from Khmeropedies)
SUON BUN RITH: Visual arts take the lead, they are so much advanced. Now the performing arts starting. Contemporary dance is starting.
(Music from Khmeropedies)
My name is Suon Bun Rith. I am the representative of the Amrita Performing Arts, so I am dealing with performing arts for the last 14 years - everything on stage - dance, music, theatre. Amrita and the group of the artist that we are working, we are trying to find their own vocabulary, the style of Cambodian contemporary, of course Cambodian do not have a traditions of contemporary dance.
LIAM COCHRANE: Why not?
SUON BUN RITH: We have so many different art forms, heritage that our ancestors inherit to us. So we have more than 20 different dance and theatre and art form.
So there is not much room for creating new things, especially after the prolonged civil war. All about 20, almost more than half have been almost disappear. But the young people they are, see something new from of course the globalisation and all the country in the region around us.
LIAM COCHRANE: Tell me about two or three of the most exciting Cambodian artists in the contemporary art scene.
SUON BUN RITH: Just talking about the performing artists. I think for example talking about Belle, Chumvan Sodhachivy. I have a lot of hope on her. She's become like the, how to say, the young model for the younger generation.
LIAM COCHRANE: What does she do?
SUON BUN RITH: She's a great dancer. She's a classical dancer but she have a special gift of her body, easily to study many other things and she open herself up. She study so many things, she study Indian, she study contemporary, she been into Europe, into Asia and she seen so many things and now she's coming back and she try to find her own style and I can see now each time she do her own production, she choreograph and she have her bands of younger artists follow her, and work with her and happy.
And you can see the way the young people work together, the different way from the elderly master and the younger - they take a different style how to work. One that can stroll any idea into the piece the other one is one, two, three, four you have to follow this.
LIAM COCHRANE: So it's a master/disciple relationship?
SUON BUN RITH: It's a master/disciple relationship but the, now the new, what I call the next generation of the younger master. When they working into a piece I see a different relationship, like, they open, 'What is your idea?' Before the master don't really ask, 'Oh, do you have any idea in putting into this?' But now they putting in together.
LIAM COCHRANE: When Belle was eight years old her mother started teaching her traditional Cambodian ballet, a royal dance with elaborate costumes and the graceful hand gestures that are so emblematic of Cambodian culture. Years later she began to develop an interest in contemporary dance.
BELLE: I was go outside from school on the vacation. Learn some like pop dance, aerobics, some like Michael Jackson style [laughs].
LIAM COCHRANE: Belle says learning contemporary dance required not just a shift in her physical performance but in her entire approach to dance.
BELLE: We can say like it's very difficult the first time because like we learn like Cambodian classical and then you know the form of classical dance, it's really exactly, the movement we have to do it the same and the same every time.
And also like very slowly, like the emotion a lot inside or the feeling and then for contemporary dance or new creation it's a, we need something more faster, a lot of energy and also about the feeling how I want to show it.
And also like less talking about human feeling about me, myself well, but when I perform classical dance it's a very beautiful, perfect, like we feel like a god. The feeling and the movement of my body come, get from the feeling of classical dance and then I feel like I don't want to cut it. So I just combine it from the past and the future, put it together to present it.
(Hip-hop music)
LIAM COCHRAN: While artists like Belle have grown up amidst Cambodia's traditional art forms and travelled abroad for new experiences, the traffic is going the other way too.
Anida Yoeu Ali was born in Cambodia but her family fled the Khmer Rouge and she grew up in Chicago. Recently, she moved to Phnom Penh and with her Japanese partner, Masahiro Sugano, and together they've started Studio Revolt. The studio produces films and performances that often involve social or political commentary.
(Music - Samnang's Bear)
ANIDA YOEU ALI: The stuff that we do as a collaboration is not only making these shorts but kind of envisioning them as projects and as something that seems like it has a beginning but not really an end point.
And by that I mean like we're doing projects like the Gallery Psar Kandal piece which was a huge social experiment of bringing art into an environment like Psar Kandal which is a lively open-air market in the middle of the city where no one expects to see art and the normal art viewers don't expect to have that encounter with everyday culture. And so that was the project we did that we thought was extremely successful.
LIAM COCHRANE: What sort of art did you take into the market?
MASAHIRO SUGANO: So on the first day it was a two-day project. On the first day we set up a camera for three hours in the middle of the market, bustling market and we asked people to jump and we took a picture.
And on the second day we put up these walls that are to emulate the environment of the gallery - the two white walls. But it looks more like pillars, two pillars. And we cut out a hole on those and we put a digital monitor inside so we would just show the pictures that we took the day before.
It was kind of chaotic because vendors didn't want to pillars in front of their store and they were very hostile at the beginning, which we expected because you know, most of the time hard-working people view fine art as a waste of time and money. But eventually the market people really embraced it and it was like a gathering, chatting corner throughout the evening.
Art is something that is usually nurtured by the middle class, the upper-middle class, you know, with a disposable income and people who have time to go out on Friday night and chat and look at art. Because of the economic situation right now in Cambodia, a large part of this country just cannot afford the kind of thinking. So most of the art that probably immediately seek for are like stress relief, such as karaoke which we always make fun of but it has a vital function in this society.
LIAM COCHRANE: While karaoke-style concerts in beer gardens may still be a popular form of entertainment there have been some musical breakthroughs as well.
Cambodian psychedelic rock from the 1960s is being reworked and re-imagined by bands like the Cambodian Space Project and Dengue Fever.
(Music Dengue Fever)
Based in Los Angeles, Dengue Fever consists of a Cambodian singer fronting a band of American musicians.
(Music Dengue Fever)
Meanwhile, the Cambodian Space Project is a similar arrangement - a Cambodian woman singing with a band of foreigners, but they are based in Phnom Penh.
(Music Cambodian Space Project)
Expatriate musicians, artists and gallery owners have played prominent roles in fostering Cambodia's contemporary arts scene, although more and more, Cambodians are taking the lead. It's an interplay that must sometimes be delicately handled, as Masahiro Sugano explains.
MASAHIRO SUGANO: So as I come here I found it very difficult to frame art without being a little patronising in some ways. So I guess that's why we positioned ourselves to be in the position to question it rather than telling what art should be. Like we question on behalf of each other to the Westerners 'Should the art be like this?' And I ask my people, 'What do you think the arts should be?'
LIAM COCHRANE: Of course in a country that's still struggling to find its feet economically, pondering the nature of art is a luxury many can't afford. Just the simple logistics of obtaining raw materials can be tough in a place like Cambodia, says Anida Yoeu Ali.
ANIDA YOEU ALI: It is so difficult to be an artist, a Cambodian artist growing up here because of the lack of resources and so if people really understand the nature of art making the resourcefulness that artists have to be, specifically in Cambodia is painstaking.
And I don't think that people understand that. That just to make something from scratch here is very a hard thing because they just don't have access to a lot supplies and so they have to be very resourceful. And there's not like a studio that you can just go to or you can just have. You know people are doing it like in the dark in their homes or in a little corner or making do with whatever space they have.
LIAM COCHRANE: Painter Tevy works in humble surrounds, but she doesn't seem to mind too much.
OEUR SOKUNTEVY: I just work in my living room. I don't like to have a big studio place because it makes no sense for me. And I like to wake up and then start to work. Don't need to have a big one. Very small. That's nice.
LIAM COCHRANE: Tevy's been painting for years and is only just getting around to a large work with oil on canvas.
Java Gallery owner, Dana Langlois, explains that resources aren't the only challenge for artists.
DANA LANGLOIS: Socially it can be quite difficult. They are often criticised and seen in kind of a strange light. Although that's changing. But I mean the word for creative in the Khmer language actually means you're a little bit crazy and not in a good way.
LIAM COCHRANE: So no matter what sort of art you're producing, even if it's not at all political or challenging whatsoever, just being an artist is enough?
DANA LANGLOIS: Exactly. And then that's what has to be understood about the context of art and art creation here is that this process is just, yeah just putting it out there already is a major effort and a major statement.
LIAM COCHRANE: A major statement is exactly what's planned for 2013, with a big Cambodian art showcase in New York City. Dana Langlois explains the ambitious project.
DANA LANGLOIS: Basically we're talking about Season of Cambodia which is supposed to take place in New York City in 2013. The idea's really kind of highlighting and celebrating what's been happening here in Cambodia specifically in the arts and cultural areas.
And then my role as the visual arts curator is to put together a program of some of the established artists as well as some of the emerging ones and talking about what are the contemporary art practices here in Cambodia.
And specifically one of the things I want to do is also build these kind of links to the New York audience. Audience or community or other artists. There's certainly a lot of commonalities there it's just trying to find those links.
LIAM COCHRANE: And will that be essentially Cambodia's big moment on the international stage?
DANA LANGLOIS: Ah, yes. Yes it is. I'm always a little hesitant at that 'cause you know the international stage, there's a lot of multiplicity there. I mean it's not just New York anymore. It's Hong Kong, it's Singapore, it's London, it's Mumbai, you know. When do you suddenly define it as an international stage, I don't know. But it's certainly a moment, a special moment where a lot of people will be able to take notice of what's happening here.
LIAM COCHRANE: The sort of big vision behind the New York show is providing inspiration to other art forms. Although Suon Bun Rith says audiences for performing arts are still coming to terms with the protocols of modern art.
SUON BUN RITH: At least for the last 14 years that I consider, I am happy with the result and successes, they come to get the ticket. So now they know before they can go to see a show they need a ticket in their mind now, they know that. Before, like we don't really have the mind of oh getting the ticket.
LIAM COCHRANE: What did they do beforehand? They'd just turn up?
SUON BUN RITH: They just turn up, they go and see. I know because we have very long traditions of open air and no one need a ticket to go to see a show. No one need to pay anything to go to see a show. There must be someone that must be a sponsor who was dancing there.
Now they know to come to get the ticket if they want to see a show. But again, no payment, the ticket is still free [laughs]. But about the audience that turn out to our new contemporaries, I am so very satisfied with that. I mean they support the new energy, they support the new artists. All this is great.
LIAM COCHRANE: Suon Bun Rith is about to move from the capital Phnom Penh to Battambang, which is fast becoming a cultural hub in the country.
A school there teaches music, dance and circus and it's doing incredibly well. It may not be widespread, but at least in some urban areas, a whole new generation of Cambodian kids are growing up with contemporary art as part of their education, part of their lives.
SUON BUN RITH: Culture is belong to them, it belongs to the next generation. Everyone I believe, Cambodian people, we own our culture and we have the right to preserve and make our culture alive. Cambodian is starting. I am quite sure that the new contemporary dance will have a great future.
(Music Dengue Fever)
ELIZABETH JACKSON: That report from Liam Cochrane. And you've been listening to a radio current affairs documentary.
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