Veasna TITH | curator and visual artist | veasna.tith@gmail.com
Veasna is a very active artist in the Cambodian art scene. She worked hard for many years to give woman artists a voice among a very male dominated art scene. Veasna have been involved with many international workshops and exhibitions. She was part of the Selapak Neari program and launched herself an emerging curator. She organized many exhibitions at Bophana, Meta House and the Department of Plastic Arts of the Ministry of Culture of Cambodia.
In 2008, she took a position as a curator for the exhibition called “I wonder…” A year later, Veasna curated another exhibition titled “Still Water” in which she was also one of the artists. Currently, she is pursuing her Master Degree in Fine Art from Department of Textile, Donghua University, in Shanghai.
Her artists statement:
My whole life I have really appreciated women. Women do a lot of things and they should be appreciated. A lady has a thousand hands. This is a Khmer proverb. People say that women just stay home and are housewives, but even in this role they show their strength. Women work both inside and outside the house now, but the men are not required to do this. I think about the strongest points of women. How they push men to become a leader and how it is the women who push the men to achieve. Everyone speaks about men, but it’s the women who are the hardest workers. Even in beauty, women are very beautiful in movies or elsewhere. There is something more special about women. Men are tough, but women in their softness are strong. I think you see their strength in their flexibility. The movement of a man’s hand is hard and strong, but the women’s hands are flexbile and soft. I like the movement of a woman’s hand when she is dancing. I like that the hand represents everything. It represents not only the movement you see, but also the idea inside. I focus a lot on the movement of the hand. I like the bending and the pliancy of the hand that attracts the audience. Hand movements in real life are very natural. I like design also. Anyone can observe the nature of hand movements, similar to rice fields or flowers or small plants. These small things are beautiful like small hands which decorate the temples, or small intricate patterns on clothes. We cannot image how nature can create something like this — these patterns. How can they be? A lot of gender training about women is only window dressing. I want to show how much women can do.
Exhibitions
2011
2010
- “Diverse Harmony” with Vichaya Mukdamanee and Veasna Tith, The Art House , Old parliament lane, Singapore
- Co-curator of “Golden Reawakening”, group exhibition at Chinese House, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
2009
- Curator “Still Water”, group exhibition of 18 local artists, Bophana Center, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
2008
- “I Love PP”, group exhibition at Java Café, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- “Arts of Survival II”, group exhibition at Bophana Audio Visual Resource Center, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- “Bax Experiment”, Spotlight Asian Arts Festival, Epic Art, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- “Arts of Survival I”, group exhibition at Meta House, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- Curator of “I Wonder” at the Department of Plastic Arts of the Ministry of Culture, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
2007
- Group show “Mean Rup Mean Tuk” at the Ministry of Culture of Cambodia, Department of Plastic Arts in Phnom Penh.
17 artists exhibiting at the department of plastic arts of the ministry of culture. 5 Khmer artists and 12 international artists coming together to produce a series of works on the theme : with a body comes suffering. The crowd was overwhelming but the greatest success story is not about the sale, not about the many hundred people but about the khmer artists who exhibited the first time their works.
