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From the Phnom Penh Post, July 6-19, 2001

Ground level perspective of Cambodia

By Erin Moriarty

Family life is transcendent in Svay Ken's painted history of Cambodia.

Svay Ken offers a rare glimpse at the lives of ordinary Cambodians during the tumultuous past 60 years in his unique book and exhibit entitled Painted Stories: The life of a Cambodian family from 1941 to the present. Ken, a self-taught artist who didn't start painting until he was 61, was inspired to write the story of his family when his beloved wife, Tith Yun, died in February, 2000.

With the help of Ly Daravuth and Ingrid Muan of the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture, Ken's text was translated into English and he began painting a series of 128 paintings to illustrate his story. He completed the series within a year. The paintings, which range from depictions of peaceful rural life to illustrations of bitter human struggle during times of war, offer a vivid and personal account of daily life in a country whose history is too often recounted as a strictly political narrative.

"I just wanted to paint an ordinary Khmer family," Ken said. "I like to show the lives of farmers because it documents a way of life that could soon be gone to modern ways... I think about the old ways."

The exhibit, which includes explicit images of life under the Khmer Rouge and of the everyday violence that affected families during decades of war, portrays Cambodian history in a very personal context.

"I wanted to show about our life and how we lived through that history," Ken said of the exhibit. "It's not about history, but about what happened to us under those historical circumstances. It's not an official history, it's just what I remember."

Though admitting the paintings can serve as teaching tools for both children and adults Ken says he didn't have any didactic intentions for the series.

"The only lesson I could share is that if you're educated, life is much easier. Since I was never educated, I was a laborer, but I passed this onto my children," he said, counting among his four sons, a doctor, businessman, anthropologist and MBA student.

Ken, 69, took up painting in 1993 as he neared retirement and realized he would soon be too tired to continue doing physical work. After working as a waiter and handy man for what is now the Hotel le Royal off and on for more than 30 years, he now paints from his small gallery called Khmer Art, just north of Wat Phnom. Ken said he wanted to paint the rural life that he had grown up in, yet admitted he was drawn also to depicting ordinary life a bit by default.

"I saw people painting pretty paintings of Angkor and land-scapes with palm trees but I didn't go to school, so I knew I couldn't paint like that, so I decided to just show the life of a farmer," he said.

Ken's work also has been exhibited in Japan and Singapore, benefiting from a nascent trend of international curiosity about a country whose artistic tradition has been battered by years of civil conflict.

"It seems to be a time when people are trying to include Cambodian artists because it's been a blank space for so long," said Reyum's Muan, who is a professor of art history in Phnom Penh. "His work is unusual because there are hardly any paintings of real life available — most of the contemporary paintings are made-up landscapes with a palm tree and an ox-cart."

While most visitors to the gallery are charmed by Ken's insightful, yet very simple, paintings, Ken insists in his self-effacing style that he's not a "real" artist.

"I never went to school and nobody taught me how to paint — I'm no artist, I'm no author," he said, sitting in his dusty gallery surrounded by some of the 800 or so creations he has painted since 1993.

Svay Ken's exhibition is at the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture on Street 178 across from the National Gallery, with the accompanying interpretative text available in both Khmer and English. Reyum is open seven days a week from 8 to 6 pm.