“The truest friends are those who help each other in happiness and health and who don’t abandon each other in times of great suffering. Friends deserve glorious memory and riches without wanting to be famous. If one knows something, then that one wants to share it with the other, never looking for reasons to be jealous, never speaking badly of the friend. When one sees the friend has done wrong, the other counsels them, never lets them take the wrong road. Friends never say one thing and mean another, never lie to or receive each other, pointing out the way to earn achievement and success is through honesty. Such a good friend is hard to find.” – Svay Ken,
He was the Raffles handyman turned grandfather of contemporary Cambodian art; she was a doctor of art history from Columbia University with a penchant for soft cotton trousers and dark shirts “with spots like gecko eggs”. Between them, the late Svay Ken and Ingrid Muan formed a close if uncanny companionship, one that would lift the self-taught painter onto the international stage and radically alter the way the world viewed Cambodian creativity. Svay Ken, whose ‘studio’ was for years little more than a small easel erected in the shadow of Wat Phnom, was the first artist in this country to “candidly depict daily life, rather than glorify rural vistas or ancient monuments”, as Sa Sa Bassac curator Erin Gleeson noted following his death in 2008 at the age of 76 (by which time, having been born in 1933, he had painted everything from the Japanese invasion of Cambodia to atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge). “Ken remained disinterested in mining international art history for styles or themes,” Gleeson wrote in Art Asia Pacific magazine. “Very often, journalists and curators assumed Ken had conceptual intentions behind his practice, while in fact he was simply practical. When asked by a journalist why he painted a claw-foot bathtub, he replied: ‘Yesterday I went for a walk and I saw an old bathtub thrown away in an alley.’” When his son brought news in 2005 that Ingrid had died suddenly after a doctor mistreated a dog bite, Svay Ken began to sob. “Ingrid’s death was a typical Cambodian thing: she had a minor disease, went to the wrong doctor and died two days later,” says Nico Mesterharm, of Meta House, where the exhibit A Good Friend Is Hard To Find opens this week, followed by the screening of a video interview with the artist from 2008. “Svay Ken was devastated because they really had a strong friendship and for sure she had discovered him. Over the course of a month, he painted 30 paintings – it’s like a comic book, where he describes his friendship and the moments in this friendship which meant the most to him.”
WHO: Svay Ken
WHAT: A Good Friend Is Hard To Find exhibition opening and film screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm February 11
WHY: He’s right about good friends