Cycle 2 version 3 sopheap pich lungs
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Woven Into History
Visitors to the South and Southeast Asian section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this spring are in for an unusual sight. Amid a courtly installation of Angkor empire sculpture hangs Buddha 2 (), a handwoven, rattan-and-bamboo sculpture by Sopheap Pich (pronounced so&#;-pi-ap pitch), arguably Cambodia&#;s most progressive contemporary artist. Nine other intricately latticed Pich works, more abstract in nature, may be found in two adjoining galleries. &#;Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich,&#; organized by the senior departmental curator John Guy, is the Met&#;s contribution to the Season of Cambodia: A Living Arts Festival, a citywide event featuring numerous exhibitions, cultural programs, performances and artist residencies intended to introduce New York audiences to contemporary Khmer art and culture.1
Only a few months ago, Cambodia itself solemnly marked the passing of King Norodom Sihanouk (), long a symbol of political,
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Sopheap Pich
Sopheap Pich is one of very few Cambodian artists exhibiting internationally at present, having appeared in exhibitions in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Norway, and in triennials in Japan and Australia. At the end of Pol Pot’s devastating rule, an eight-year-old Pich together with his family ended up in relocation camps in Thailand, where they lived for several years before making their way to the United States. Pich received an American university education and attended graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago. He returned to Cambodia, at age thirty-two, in
Though Pich had studied to be a painter, in he started making sculptures from rattan, bamboo, and wire; he abandoned painting altogether the following year. His earliest sculptures were abstract installations or replicated forms of internal organs. He has occasionally returned to these works, as with the lung sculpture Silence, Version 4, , which was included in this exhibition along with several other
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Sopheap Pich
For his first New York solo exhibition, Phnom Penh–based artist Sopheap Pich takes us right to Cambodia’s heart––and to its stomach, kidneys, and lungs. In a series of medium-scale installations, Pich twists, contorts, and expands bamboo, rattan, and wire into organic and subtle forms that evoke human organs. Take Cycle 2, utgåva 3, , in which two stomachs are sewn together into an abstracted form, a reference to the dual concerns of starvation and food-borne illness that still plague Cambodia. Caged Heart, , encloses a partially covered, seemingly battered vessel in a circular fingerprydnad littered with farm tools and accented with delicate and downright-pretty flecks of blood-red paint.
Pich’s poetic interpretation of these individual elements––outwardly fragile but actually strong––are metonymic of the Cambodian body, and particularly of the trauma resulting from the genocide and widespread cultural destruction th