The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

129 Sopheap Pich 1979 Sopheap Pich creates sculptures that respond to his surroundings, landscape and history. Central to Pich’s practice is how we perceive and experience the world, and his works reflect his upbringing and contemporary experience in Cambodia, as well as his years living and studying in the United States. Working with rattan, bamboo and burlap — materials used in Cambodian craft and agriculture — his refined, expressive sculptures move between abstract and figurative representations of forms and phenomena, observed in the natural environment and in daily Cambodian life. For the installation ‘1979’, made for APT6, Pich has created a series of evocative sculptures that recall objects he observed in the landscape during the journey back to his hometown of Battambang, shortly after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. 1 When the Vietnamese army defeated the regime in January 1979, families began to drift out of the village communes they had been imprisoned in and return home. Pich and his family walked for several days across country roads and rice fields, encountering others like themselves, making their way back to places and lives they had once known. Drawing on this experience in ‘1979’, Pich provides a personal context in which to consider this pivotal period of Cambodian history, and the complex function of memory in narratives of the past. Eight years old at the time, Pich recalls the journey as a surreal introduction to the unknown: These objects were alien to me at the time but in seeing them I realised my world was bigger, that Cambodia was bigger, and that I was seeing things for the first time. 2 While the anticipation of a changed world was palpable, the sudden surfacing of incongruous forms in the countryside was equally disquieting. Rusted, burnt, and in various states of disuse, of these forms he notes, ‘I didn’t know what they were or where they came from. From the sky? From the war?’. 3 Pich’s characteristic rattan sculptures are reworked here with opaque and transparent materials. In ‘1979’, landmines, military equipment, machine parts and bombshells — meticulously crafted from rattan, bamboo and burlap — are assembled in the gallery space as if discarded in a field. Buffaloes carved by village craftsmen are reduced by the enormity of the objects scattered nearby. Textured with burlap and coloured with paint, the forms evoke what the artist refers to as ‘the vagueness of memory . . . these are weighted memories and they are also unclear’. 4 The variations in both scale and proportion of these combined elements suggest a forensic investigation of the remnants of war from the vantage point of a child. Pich’s Machine (from ‘1979’ series) appears as a large curvilinear remnant of a formerly functional object, its worn, punctured lining evoking an aeroplane turbine. Its pierced burlap surface allows light to enter, revealing internal segments and cavities. Binoculars with Buffalo (from ‘1979’ series) is an oversized pair of field-glasses realised as finely structured conical shapes which are wall-mounted, exaggerating its redundancy as a tool. Hundreds of strands of rattan are knitted together with wire to create the sculpture, which cast shadows onto an upward-gazing buffalo below. Buffaloes are celebrated in Cambodia for their endurance and strength, and Pich draws parallels between them and the state of the Khmer people at the time: ‘We were thin and laboured and we had endured . . . we were like buffaloes, we had been deprived’. 5 Like fragments of memory, his reconfigured forms reflect the intangible components of human perception. At the end of their journey, Pich’s family settled temporarily in the grounds of Wat Ta Mim temple in Battambang town before being repatriated to a refugee camp in Thailand. Buddha (from ‘1979’ series) marks the significance of the journey, its twists and turns echoed in the contours of the sculpture’s body. The willowy curls of the rattan, its tips stained with red dye, produce ethereal patterns on the floor and wall. Citing the fragments of pillaged statuary throughout the countryside, it is a sombre finale. Sopheap Pich recalls his experience upon entering the temple: . . . there was a feeling of fear, of haunt. Inside the temple, on the ceiling, and floor, red all over. On the other end was ghostly, shadowy shapes of different objects unclear to me at the time, but this was a place where statues are located. 6 Mellissa Kavenagh Endnotes 1 In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge seized power, Pich and his family were relocated from their town of Battambang in north-western Cambodia, near the border of Thailand, to a labour camp in a village commune known as Macleaur. See Cambodian Artists Speak Out: The Art of Survival (Occasional Papers on Democratic Development), Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, vol.4, 2008, pp.53–7. See <www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_14242-544-2-30.pdf >, viewed 8 July 2009. 2 Sopheap Pich, conversation with the author, Brisbane, 3 July 2009. 3 Pich, conversation with the author. 4 Sopheap Pich, email to the author, 12 June 2009. 5 Pich, conversation with the author. 6 Sopheap Pich, email to the author, 22 August 2009.