The Long Way Home
“If I hear there are protests in an area, I go there. I want to know what happened, and I want to show it through art,” Khvay Samnang said to me. He was explaining his artistic process, which has involved dumping buckets of sand over himself in a series of performance-protests, or filming a dancer embodying rainforest animal spirits. The bucolic settings and humorous antics often belie the seriousness of the subject matter, as his works are urgent, if unexpected, responses to contemporary issues such as environmental degradation. At the same time, he tries to steer clear of didacticism, instead conveying empathy, compassion and spiritual wonder.
Born in Svay Rieng province, Cambodia, the artist studied painting at the painting. “There weren’t many mediums I could choose [at university],” he explained. He had also trained in photography while a student at RUFA, but it was a trip in 2009 to Japan for a residency at Tokyo Wonder Site that opened his eyes to a wealth of artistic possibilities. “I saw something that Cambodia didn’t have. It made me think that it’s not only painting that can show what I want to say; there’s also photography, video and my body.” The residency culminated in an early performance work, (2010), in which he donned a headpiece resembling buffalo horns and gave free rickshaw rides to strangers as a gesture of thanks to his host city. The horns had been crafted from hair collected at Phnom Penh’s roadside hairdressers, bringing a slice of the artist’s native country to Japan.
