Forever Until Now: Contemporary Art from Cambodia

This 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, exhibit provides, for the first time, a complete overview of contemporary art in today’s cambodia. Wide-ranging practices in painting, sculpture, film and photography by fourteen artists spanning three generations reveal new and culturally specific perspectives from a country too often defined by ancient temples and collective trauma.

The artists selected for Forever Until Now are anomalies in a country with an anomalous history. They are fourteen of only forty practicing artists in a Kingdom of fourteen million. They are either survivors or were born into a culture of survivalist thought and practice. They have coped and they continue to cope with creative tolerance to their surroundings. They evolve visual art practices regardless, or, in some cases, in spite of what is absent.

The regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979 killed the majority of educated people, including an estimated ninety percent of artists. In terms of visual arts practices, surviving artists moved forward, understandably, by enlivening traditions that were nearly lost.

The guideposts by which artists express themselves are responses to personal living experience. In this way, the artists provide a window into contemporary thought in Cambodia, with some artists considering the past as a means to build collective memory, and others reflecting the present as a means to consider the future.

Source: 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Erin Gleeson, Curator

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