Svay Sareth made the canoe by hand without any boat-building experience The man with the boat clearly means business.
He is pushing the trailer-mounted vessel by hand down a red, dirt road - walking as quickly as a soldier barracked by a splenetic sergeant-major.
His choice of clothes matches the military theme: black from toe to neck, like the Khmer Rouge troops which took control of Cambodia's towns and cities in the 1970s.
A camouflage-green facemask completes the outfit, covering the boat-pusher's features, making him as inscrutable as Iron Man.
But Svay Sareth is neither a soldier nor a superhero. He is an artist, and this is part of his work - a performance and multimedia exhibition called Tuesday.
Svay Sareth is making a name for himself and for Cambodia Sareth had made the small, traditional canoe by hand without any previous boat-building experience. And its short journey over land was highly symbolic - from his home on the dusty, semi-rural outskirts of Siem Reap to a five-star hotel in Cambodia's prime tourist location near the Angkor temples.
It reflects the distance Cambodia has come over the past decade or so, since the final surrender of the Khmer Rouge - but also Sareth's personal journey.
He spent most of his childhood in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, where the closest he got to national treasures like Angkor Wat was in his imagination.
"I was too young to have any memories of Cambodia," he explains. "But I would always dream of going back and the way I found to express that was to draw a picture of a little boat.
"Later, as an adult, I read Robinson Crusoe, and that really struck a chord with me. Making the boat was a way to make something out of everything I had been feeling."
Sareth has been something of a pioneer for Cambodian artists. He notes that most of the country's art history was "erased" by three decades of war.
Svay Sareth's paintings of fighting fish But he has played his part in changing that - firstly by taking art lessons in the refugee camp, then co-founding an art school when he finally made it back to Cambodia in the 1990s.
More recently, he left again, this time for France and fresh artistic inspiration.
Sareth discovered different ways of expressing himself including performance and boat-building, a considerable leap from the traditional Cambodian emphasis on painting and sculpture.
"I didn't want to become a European artist," he says, "but it was necessary for the growth of my dream."
Now in his 40s, Sareth i
No comments:
Post a Comment