My own artwork is about much more than a personal identity search. Through my artwork I want to connect with the broad community of professional artists and art students in Cambodia, in the Cambodian diaspora, and in other countries and explore with them what it means to be a Cambodian artist in the modern postwar era.

Cambodians’ sense of identity was lost in the 1970s as “khmerness” was associated with the Khmer Rouge genocide. During the years of procommunist government afterward, censorship was at its peak. Today the Cambodian people continue to self-censor either out of fear of future reprisals or out of habit of silencing their opinions. My work on behalf of artists goes beyond promoting the Cambodian art scene and empowering a culture: it is about free expression wherever you are. My mission from the beginning was to create a binding relationship between artists of different dimensions, to connect them to exhibition spaces, and to show the most creative minds working in the visual arts in Cambodia today.

Cambodian art is not merely a nationalistic endeavor to put an exotic culture on display. Cambodian artists are taking their place in their own right in the global contemporary art community. Through my website and curatorial efforts, I seek to exhibit the most prominent Cambodian artists in the country and abroad.

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