Category: Art

If walls could talk

If we were to examine Loven Ramos’ DNA, we might find interconnecting shapes resembling paint brushes, rhyming chromosomes, and hotel tokens much like those in the game of Monopoly. Art, poetry and hotels, in fact, are the three cornerstones of his life. But who is Loven Ramos? This affable, inspiring man is a visual poet from the Philippines and his intriguing exhibition, Room Service, opens on September 11. It focuses on the intertwining fates of a hotel’s day-to-day business, as well as intimate portraits of people and events.

“The key to my exhibition is the material,” says the artist. “I have contacted many hotels and collected old linens, menus, doors… When those items arrived, I touched them and started communicating with them. ‘What happened under these sheets? Who flipped through the pages of this menu?’, I wondered. Then stories started to unfold.”

This love for art and poetry started at a tender age, thanks to a children’s magazine which published a poem by William Butler Yeats. “I was seven or eight when I got tricked into The Song Of Wandering Aengus. Not only the words were very deep, but it was also illustrated so beautifully that it really gave me a sense of wonder.” His passion for literature further developed through his grandmother, who owned a library in their village. When Loven moved to Manila, he found himself among artists, whom he endeavoured to learn from. “You drew before you walked,” Loven’s mother used to tell him. Says Loven: “Translating poetry into visual art, and vice versa, is a way to fully express myself. Every time I work on something, words and images play simultaneously in my head.”

But for now, let’s return to hotels, around which Loven has always orbited. It was in a hotel that he had his first exhibition and also in a hotel that he found, by chance, an old girlfriend from college (now his wife). Today, he owns his own: the 1961 hotel/art gallery in Siem Reap. “It’s funny how, for a couple of decades, the history of Cambodia has been shaped by hotels,” he says. “Sofitel, Raffles and Amansara, for example, have hosted politicians, presidents, royalties and heads of state, from Jacqueline Kennedy to US President Barack Obama, and many important agreements were taken at that time. I was there; I have seen this happening, while wondering what was going on in this or that room.”

In his multimedia exhibition, Loven showcases collages, soft sculptures, paintings and installations. As a hotel-inspired ‘creative archaeologist’, he digs out, suggests, reveals.

WHO: Loven Ramos
WHAT: Room Service exhibition opening
WHERE: The Insider Gallery, InterContinental Hotel, #296 Mao Tse Tung Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm September 11 – October 11
WHY: “The hotel and the characters under its roof serve as a microcosm for what was happening in the country during that time.” – Emilio Estevez

 

More Than Skin Deep

Peer too closely at her eyes and you run the risk of hypnosis. Horizontal flashes of light bounce off deep blue-black irises, a slight reddish glow warming their otherwise cold hue. Framed by a squarely cut bob, the face at first seems scarred; tiny lines etched into its surface suggest… years passed, perhaps? Lent a rose-coloured tint by flushing cheeks, upon closer inspection the face of this exotic-looking woman is in fact scored with tiny montages featuring the joyful stick-figures of childhood. Here a group sporting crudely drawn party hats; there a simple dwelling. For, after all, are we not the sum of our experiences? In twin exhibitions, opening this week, Thai artists ‘Age’ (Padungphon Rincom) and Aranya Khunchawattichai explore the reflections of our lives that become etched into our very flesh as we grow as human beings. Age opens 6:30pm September 11 at Samai Distillery, #9b Street 830 & Sothearos Boulevard, and Aranya opens 6:30pm September 12 at Tepui @ Chinese House, Street 84 & Sisowath Quay.

 

Back where u belong

An interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen and helium swarms in vivid red and yellow splashes, the beginnings of predatory black holes surreptitiously nibbling at the nebulae’s edge. Perhaps we are not so high in the sky, peering instead over the spread wings of some soaring firebird above a scorched, yellow desert about to be engulfed by the night. Or could it be that our nose is planted among the shimmering petals of a wild, exotic jungle plant? That’s rather up to you, as it turns out. Schooled in traditional Cambodian painting at the Royal University of Fine Arts, graphic arts student Em Riem – whose new exhibition Hello, Sally! opens at Plantation on September 5 – won a scholarship in 2001 to Saint-Étienne École des Beaux-arts, in Paris. “A lot changed for me,” says the artist, today known almost as much for his modelling career as his canvases. “In school here, it was very academic: we respected mostly the traditional Angkor Wat style, traditional painting. It was very realist. Then in France, we respected concepts and ideas and then technique. It was very, very difficult for me the first year, but the teacher said: ‘No. Here, we don’t need nice drawings – we need technique and colour.’ When my paintings became abstract, I was thinking about what Picasso said: that some artists transform the yellow into the sun and some turn the sun into yellow. I got it. Abstract has nothing to present – just the colour, and the colour signifies freedom for the artists and also freedom for the viewer to think about it.”

WHO: Em Riem
WHAT: Hello, Sally! exhibition opening
WHERE: The Plantation, #28 Street 184
WHEN: 6pm September 5
WHY: “Abstract has nothing to present – just the colour, and the colour signifies freedom for the artists and also freedom for the viewer to think about it.” – Em Riem

Born free… or freer?

A flock of white-beaked wading birds stretch their long, lithe necks toward the sky like wisps of smoke escaping a fire. Bodies entwine like rivulets of water in a bubbling stream; looping back in on themselves in rich, colour-soaked circles. “We are born free, and everywhere in chains. We are animals in zoos behind bars, we are women and men locked away in our factories and offices. The only difference between animal and human is the hand, which can wave, caress, paint; but also build barriers, construct fences and turn locks. Still, the eyes of humans, eyes of birds, eyes of beasts, all twinkle with the desire for liberty.” In Chhan Dina’s newly extended exhibition Cages Torn Open: Further And Freer, this Cambodian painter/sculptor reminds us of what we share with other living beings and what we forget and deny. Her paintings explode with colour, a confident assertion of the shared liberation theme. Bringing together large clay sculptures and vivid oil paintings, paint, line and colour blur the distinctions between species, all swimming in the same soup; in fired clay, disparate characteristics are fused into one body. “Faces shine at us, even when grotesque. Open hands reach towards us, into us, prompting a reflection on the nature of humanity: a word we use to describe both our highest ideals and our inevitable imperfections. Are we feeding the animals? Warding off danger? Asking for forgiveness? Giving a warning? Offering a helping hand? These hands are tearing open the cages that keep us from embracing all living things.”

WHO: Chhan Dina
WHAT: Cages Torn Open: Further And Freer art exhibition opening
WHERE: Insider Gallery @ The Intercontinental Hotel, Mao Tse Tung Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm August 7 until September 8
WHY: We are all born free

I, Robot

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants them to battle it out at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Long-suffering South Korean baseball team the Hanwa Eagles (think 400 losses in five years) uses them as proxies to ‘liven up’ games. And US President Barack Obama recently went toe-to-toe with one in a rather unusual game of soccer. From Greek god Hephaestus’ talking mechanical handmaidens to Robonaut 2, the first humanoid in space, robots have long occupied hallowed ground in that most fertile of territories, the human mind.

In 322BC, taking up an earlier reference in Homer’s Iliad, Aristotle speculated in Politics that automatons could someday bring about human equality by making possible the abolition of slavery: “There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that ‘Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus’, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.”

Rather more recently in human (and humanoid) history, robots – defined by most roboticists as a programmable brain that moves a body – have become a point of fascination for Thai artist Jitti Jumnianwai, who specialises in “robots and spaceships for adults and children alike”. His most artistic of automatons, intricate and detailed to the last, cannot fail to touch those whose lives were forever changed by the original Star Wars trilogy. Here, sci-fi meets a childlike aesthetic that somehow becomes modern art. Of his inspiration, the artist, a 2005 graduate of Chiang Mai University, says it “stems in part from the toys I played with as a child, and in my paintings I want to express the happiness I felt when a child”.

WHO: Jitti Jumnianwai
WHAT: Robots exhibition opening
WHERE: Tepui @      Chinese House, Sisowath Quay & Street 84
WHEN: 7pm August 1
WHY: “You just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.” – Sir Isaac Asimov

 

Falling on my head like a memory

Sorrow, trauma, apathy, lethargy. A grim roll-call by any standards, but as the wet season descends, surely there can be no better time to turn the eyes inward and contemplate one’s very existence? It’s precisely this type of intense, soul-stirring introspection that’s triggered when gazing too long or too hard at the work of Battambang-born Nov Cheanick  – a graduate of the Phare Ponleu Selpak school of arts and perhaps best known for his life-sized sculpture of a green cow at Phnom Penh airport – in his new exhibition, Rain.

From between form-distorting droplets of moisture, mournful souls peer out at whichever existential storm-chaser faces the painting. Tiny rivulets of colour creep horizontally across canvas, like wind-blown raindrops along the window of a speeding train. Rain, here, is a metaphor; one for that grimmest of roll calls mentioned in the opening par. Nov says sorrow and trauma lead to apathy and lethargy, and this is especially apparent in the Cambodian countryside, where farmers and labourers can achieve little during rainy season and so, in quiet resignation, do nothing at all.

In many of the textured-to-the-touch images, figures sit waiting, partly revealed under the paint splatter of falling rain. In others, the landscape is drenched into obscurity. On smaller canvases there’s the suggestion of clarity, with the portrait of a mysterious man emerging from a dark background, or disappearing into a lighter one. “I don’t want to read any more books of suffering that people have wrote,” Nov says. “Write a new page of happiness; find peace in the dirty place with a dirty life.” Says curator Dana Langlois, from Java Arts: “In this poetic, introspective work, he calls for action – not the storm-the streets kind of action, but the kind of action that transforms the spirit.”

Rain, by Nov Cheanick, is open at Java Café & Gallery, #56 Sihanouk Blvd, now.    

 

Hooker with a heart of gold?

For a prostitute who’s been on the game for more than half a century, she isn’t doing too badly: this most unusual of Chinese characters has thus far spawned a novel, a Broadway play starring William Shatner, a Hollywood film, two unofficial sequels and even a ballet. And though the realm she inhabits is one of fantasy, her story – first created by British novelist Richard Mason in 1957 – defies its boundaries.

Suzie Wong, in its original form, is a tale about a young British artist who moves to Hong Kong in search of inspiration, where he inadvertently checks himself into a brothel for British and American sailors (as one does in these parts), in which our lady plays the role of mascot. “Charming!” the artist declares joyfully, filing away his faux pas as the procurement of ‘subject matter’. Bar girls, of course, abound, but it’s Suzie – so much more than a bar girl – who proceeds to steal his heart.

Fast forward more than 50 years and Our Heroine, along with all she represents, has been embraced by comics-loving French illustrator, painter and artist Virginie Broquet, currently resident in Cambodia, who – with a slight tweak – has produced a series of graphic novels featuring… Suzy Wong. Her latest, Suzy Wong And The Spirits, is billed as ‘a graphic novel for adults dedicated with love to some of Asia’s most fascinating cities. It is a fusion between an artist’s very personal travel sketchbook and a comic book. Giving free reign to her imagination, it is the author’s hope that the work is still firmly grounded in the sensibility of real life.’

Borrowing heavily from the supernatural (says the summary: ‘Born in Hong Kong on the 17th day of the fourth month of the year of the Tiger, Suzy is in fact the reincarnation of the Daughter of the Moon… protected by three invisible but rogue ancestral spirits: her godmother Qing Yi, egghead godfather Wen Chou and brutal uncle Jia Zi’), Suzy’s travels encompass New York, Bangkok, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing and Japan – the idea, ostensibly, being to educate Francophones about the pearls of Asia.

After the brothel in which she was raised burns down in a mysterious fire, Suzy is moved to boarding school and later embarks on a mission to reconnect with her scattered relatives, ‘all tenants of shady establishments and followers of various occult sciences’. What really happened that fateful night, after which the whole family chose exile? Suzy’s French-language tale unfolds in a series of gloriously colour-rich etchings, halfway between cartoons-for-grown-ups and soft erotica, now on display along with the author’s earlier work at the Institut francais.

WHO: Virginie Broquet
WHAT: Suzy Wong graphic novel exhibition
WHERE: Institut francais, #218 St. 184
WHEN: Now!
WHY: The strange existential travels of a hooker with a heart of gold

 

Kampot art collective up in your face

The young Vietnamese girl stripped naked and screaming from napalm burns. The crouched, starving Sudanese child stalked by a vulture. As words and numbers morph into real people with lived experiences, a single shot demonstrates its capacity to transcend the statistical anonymity of humanitarian disaster and bring us face to face with actual humanity. But what about hundreds of thousands of shots?

This is the question posed by enigmatic French ‘artivist’ JR on being awarded the $1 million TED prize for the chance to create an international project for meaningful social advance. “Can art change the world?” he asks. Maybe we should change the question: can art change people’s lives?

Borne of this premise is the Inside Out project, a global participatory arts movement aimed at giving everyone – and they mean EVERYONE – the opportunity to unite in sharing their portrait and a statement of what they believe in. The format is simple: stark, black-and-white head-and-shoulder shots printed on 36 x 53-inch posters pasted publicly. Untold stories of personal identity transformed into communal works of expression and art. Metaphorical passports to the world.

Covering such themes as gender equality, climate change, racial tolerance and hope, the project has spawned nearly 200,000 portraits since 2011 in more than 100 countries across every continent. And it’s now set for its Cambodian debut to mark the launch of Kampot’s new collaborative community arts’ space, lightbox.

It may seem ironic that as society reaches its narcissistic nadir in the Age of the Selfie – a world where any random thought can be causally splashed across Twitter – oversized portraits with accompanying personal messages would be the chosen medium for an attempt at uniting. But while the Facebook community can create a contrary sense of alienation, an interpersonal disconnect with heads hidden behind digital devices in distant engagement, the direct rawness of the Inside Out installations have the power to bring our shared humanity to the immediate fore.

Titled Move Kampuchea, the 40 larger-than-life portraits in the lightbox exhibition focus on rural schoolchildren with a message of cultural renewal and the reclamation of personal and social identity. On initial viewing, it’s almost impossible not to draw parallels with the forever haunting black-and-white victim profiles at Tuol Sleng. But the difference here is hope: kids laughing and smiling; kids clowning and frowning. The very faces of Cambodia’s future.

This theme of regeneration reflects the broader aspirations and ethos of the lightbox gallery and its project partner Mayibuye, an enterprise aimed at delivering extracurricular creative-arts education to disadvantaged children. The gallery provides an inclusive space for exhibitions, screenings, live performance and workshops in contemporary and traditional arts, along with offering residencies and support for emerging young talent. The desire is to encourage and facilitate community participation and collaboration, both locally and nationally, with the aim of rebuilding cultural identity as a platform for the future following the terrible ruptures of the past.

For Move Kampuchea, coordinator Katharina Glynne enlisted the help of photographer Ellen Meyer to run workshops and act as mentor in basic photography, but the final direction of the shoot was left to the children themselves. Each took photographs of their peers, and that sense of empowerment and ownership shines through in the collection. It’s the expression of identity as both artist and subject.

So can art change people’s lives? While the lightbox team appreciates that arts education may not be at the forefront of basic needs, they believe the creative thinking engendered by self-expression to be an important element in the progression of society. By giving folk the chance to get involved in the arts, it’s hoped a new generation of creative young thinkers will help move the country toward a more dynamic future.

WHO: Creative thinkers
WHAT:  Move Kampuchea photo exhibition
WHERE: lightbox Gallery, Kampot (turn left at the Bobor corner north of Old Bridge Street)
WHEN:  June 5 – 8
WHY:  They’ve seen the future – and it’s dynamic

 

The silence of nature

A man taking a nap on his cyclo; a Khmer family chilling in an open space which resembles a theatre set; a bright red door that you are not supposed to open which discloses something decaying but terribly fascinating. That’s the unpredictable magic of life and it is the task of a good photographer to capture the moment and share it with the world. Michael Klinkhamer, a photographer from Holland, never goes anywhere without his beloved Nikon: “You never know what you can find out there!”

Following an exhibition focusing on Cambodians, the photographer turned his zoom lens to the surprising nature of the Kingdom of Wonders. In a new solo show, Pure Thomacheat (‘Pure Nature’), he explores Cambodian nature in its purest beauty as well as in its most fragile and declining aspects, where life and death co-exist. “The difficult side of taking pictures of nature is that photos can easily turn into a cliché, so for me it was more about looking into the drama of nature. Cambodia is a place where pure beauty can be found everywhere, but like most precious things in life, it is also struggling for survival.”

Prints measuring more than a metre in size have a powerful impact on the viewer. Some shots have an irresistibly poetic touch, like the photo of a small child gazing into the camera while cradling an enormous lotus leaf. This particular picture, taken during one of Klinkhamer’s photography workshops, now serves as the exhibition’s manifesto. “I was shooting with some people in a lotus field when a group of children came towards us and we started playing together. After all the fun I walked away, then I looked back and I saw a boy standing there holding a big leaf. I knew immediately that was the essential photo.”

Klinkhamer was 22 when he got his first camera. During a trip to San Francisco in the early ‘80s, he found himself caught up in a protest against the movie Cruising, in which a cop played by Al Pacino goes undercover to catch a serial killer in New York’s gay S&M scene. Newsweek printed several of his shots and he has since worked with fellow shutterbugs of note, Peter Hill Beard, Bert Stern and Tim Page.

His latest images, he says, are messages in a bottle addressed to the young generation of city dwellers who have forgotten how to look at – and listen to the voice of – nature. “Sometimes in the forest, the silence gets so deafening that your ears start to squeak. You can only hear the blood running, a few seconds later some animal starts screaming and then you have 10,000 little creatures united in a choral call pervading the whole forest.”

WHO: Michael Klinkhamer
WHAT: Pure Thomacheat (‘Pure Nature’) photo exhibition opening
WHERE: The Insider Gallery, InterContinental Hotel, #296 Mao Tse Tung Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm May 29 – June 28
WHY: “A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange

 

Odds & bobs

“Odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I’ve been to sea, I’ve fought ’gainst every odds – and I’ve gained the victory.” – from the sea ballad Snarleyyow (‘The Dog Fiend’), by Captain Frederick Marryat

“You don’t recognise the quote?!” Max Rex Fox is indignant. The artist, a New Zealander who first dropped anchor off Southeast Asian shores 15 years ago, gasps in mock horror. “It’s pretty old. It’s from Peter Pan in 1912 – Captain Hook’s explanation when he’s surprised by a hot mushroom chimney from an underground house. I’ve always liked the expression. It’s family friendly, expressing frustration without offending anyone.”

Expressing ideas without causing offence is a sentiment core to Fox’s work, as evidenced in a new exhibition at Tepui charmingly entitled Odds, Bobs, Hammer And Tongs. Lively splashes of watercolour swim across the paper’s surface, their vibrant energy barely contained by the artist’s simplistic lines of pure, hand-etched pigment. Here, a dancing monk. There, a stumbling drunk. In one particularly psychedelic painting, a tiny photograph of Marilyn Monroe – clutching the hem of her skirt – radiates concentric black-and-white ripples like a porcelain pebble skipping across a celluloid pond.

A globular figure, glowing orange, bends and stretches beneath a bulbous parasol: this is Fox’s i-monk, a jolly interpretation of one of Cambodia’s most iconic everyday images. “I wanted to stay away from realism: this isn’t my religion, isn’t my country,” says Fox. “I can use the idea but I can’t repeat how the Khmers do it because that’s their angle. He was walking along the road, he had his headphones on and he was listening to some sort of pop music or something because he was keeping time as he was walking. Basically, he was dancing along the road in his robes with his umbrella and everything. Given that monks are supposed to be non-materialistic and be these very spiritual beings, it was amusing to see he was having so much fun! The only thing that was missing was a bit of KFC in his hand.”

In Dance Of Oppression, the artist captures an intoxicated street dweller endlessly spinning on his heels in the corner of an alleyway. The Drunk represents one of those moments familiar to all but the most dedicated teetotalers: “He was a Khmer man, pretty drunk, and he was trying to step off the kerb and down into the road. He’d step back and have to put his foot out again then he’d step back again. I think his depth perception was playing tricks on him and he wasn’t sure how far he’d have to step! [Laughs] People want fun; they don’t want to be overpowered by depressing images. This is life – and it’s happy. Well, sort of happy. The context might not be happy, but the images are.”

WHO: Max Rex Fox
WHAT:  Odds, Bobs, Hammer & Tongs art exhibition opening
WHERE:  Tepui @ Chinese House, Sisowath Quay & Street 84
WHEN:  6pm May 23
WHY: “This is life – and it’s happy.” – Max Rex Fox