"Yak 2" - a drawing posted on reahu.netA Cambodian-American artist has upset some of his countrymen with highly controversial paintings of mythical apsaras, a heavenly female figure.
11/01/2009
By Luke Hunt
Bangkok Post
At first glance it's obvious. Koke Lor's art has been inspired by the bare-breasted apsaras dancing across the stone walls of Angkor Wat and hundreds of other temples that dot the Cambodian landscape.
He has also taken great pleasure in adding a dash of colour, a smile and a relaxed pose to the ladies in his portraits. In doing so, this Khmer-American artist has breathed some fresh air into an art scene overwhelmed by tradition - and landed himself an inbox full of hate mail.
Cambodia's Minister for Women's Affairs, Ing Kantha Phavy, has drawn comparisons between Lor's art and pornography, telling Spectrum the paintings were a negative reflection of Cambodian culture, values and honour, and like pornography, it was a danger to local youths.
"Most Cambodian women have reacted against these paintings. They cannot accept these paintings," she said, adding the country's powerful Post and Telecommunications Ministry is investigating ways of shutting down Lor's website, reahu.net, named after the art collective of which he is a member.
Cambodia is commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Khmer Rouge this week. Pol Pot, widely renowned for his intolerance of beauty and the annihilation of Khmer culture and apsara dancing, was swept from power by the invading Vietnamese on Jan 7, 1979.
Ten years of Vietnamese occupation followed, and civil war continued until 1998, the year Pol Pot died.
However, the country has also had 11 years of peace and is enjoying a relatively prosperous period during which the arts and education are flourishing amid hopes that a more enlightened era is beckoning. But in Cambodia the killjoys in government are never too far away.
Chuch Phoeurn, the secretary of state for the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, said Lor, like any other artist, had the right to use his imagination, but warned: "It is wrong to paint in order to degrade Cambodian women or apsara dancers."
Essentially, an apsara is a heavenly female figure, or spirit, idolised within Hindu and Buddhist cultures, and any portrayal of the mythical women who serviced the courts of Khmer kings 1,000 years ago is to tinker with the foundations of a culture.
So, when Lor plucks a woman from the ranks of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, grants her a tasteful makeover and transforms a dowdy killer into an attractive apsara with a gun, everybody in Cambodia is going to have an opinion. Especially the likes of Tuol Sleng (the notorious S-21 prison) survivor Vann Nath, who simply said: "We are not happy with these kinds of paintings. They affect the feelings of the victims and do not reflect the truth of that era."
Such attitudes have turned Lor, himself a survivor of the Killing Fields, into something of a recluse.
"To be honest, it does intimidate me," he told Spectrum, "due to the threatening emails I've received.
"You know what people in high places are capable of doing, and they could also slap me with some kind of defamation charges."
When asked about the Khmer Rouge girl, he says: "Yes I did that one. It's my way of dealing with atrocity. I went through the ordeal and it was a painful childhood.
"When it comes to the Khmer Rouge, all you'll hear is bloodshed and the Killing Fields. I've just thrown in a 'What if?"'
Lor's knowledge of the Khmer Rouge is first-hand. As an eight-year-old he fled Cambodia with his family in 1979, as Pol Pot's iron grip over the country was nearing its end and the world began counting the almost two million left dead from the policies imposed by the ultra-Maoists.
The family moved to the US, where Lor earned a degree in engineering with a minor in fine art. He is single and now lives in Chicago where he established a small art collective known as reahu.net with two other Khmer-Americans, Bong T and Chronicle.
"That is how they would like to be known. They are great tattoo artists," Lor said.
Unbeknown to most, Lor spent the 30th anniversary of Pol Pot's overthrow in Cambodia, where he sized-up the reaction to his work, and while there was no shortage of outraged puritans, there was also plenty of support from the local art scene, which readily praised his portraits.
Author Theary Seng, who wrote Daughter of the Killing Fields and is also executive director of the Centre for Social Development in Cambodia, was blunt in her appraisal: "I love it! I want to buy some for my apartment!
"It's exquisitely beautiful in it's celebration of the human body and an adherence to how apsaras were then - naked as depicted.
"His work builds Khmer culture, it doesn't destroy it," she said.
Ms Seng also reserved a few choice words for the critics.
"We are such a hypocritical and blind society to beauty; we call white, black and black, white; we trade the genuine for the synthetic.
"The naysayers tend to be those who appoint themselves as the guardians of Khmer culture, but their response is really just a knee-jerk reaction, and they have limited understanding and appreciation of beauty, aesthetics and culture," she said.
The Cambodian Centre for Human Rights has also taken up Reahu's cause and urged the government to forsake censorship and asked it not to block the Reahu website.
Meanwhile, Peg LeVine from the Melbourne-Phnom Penh based Monash Asia Institute said Lor and Reahu had struck a justifiable chord of restlessness in Cambodian society.
She said the images held a sensual beauty that was beyond question, but added: "It is not the images, per se, that are at issue here. Rather it is the vehemence by which he 'uses' if not abuses the ancestral and culturally-embedded meanings of the apsara."
In this sense she adds the artists associated with Reahu could be proving themselves to be more American-Khmer than Khmer-American.
Writing in the Phnom Penh Post, the French-Cambodian author Somanos Sar said the public outrage over Reahu was more about limits on freedom, rights and responsibilities.
"I would suggest to him that he paint a female Nazi fighter in the same way he has painted the female Khmer Rouge fighter. Maybe he could then feel the frontiers between freedom and responsibility."
Lor is unrepentant and wants Cambodians to look beyond the four walls of home, arguing that at the end of the day pictures cannot damage a culture that is confident in itself.
But given the years of destruction, a notorious culture of impunity and corruption across most levels of Cambodia's bureaucracies and institutions, few would argue that this country's culture is on solid ground.
The government has also proved adept at meddling in the social and private lives of its citizens.
At various times Western music and dance have been banned, curfews imposed, women told to wear skirts below the knee, adultery is an imprisonable offence despite the well-known dalliances of politicians, and marriage between local women and foreigners is regulated.
Lor also told Spectrum that he had considered staging an exhibition of his work in Cambodia, but had decided against it in favour of keeping it on the internet, at least in the short term.
"I don't think Cambodia is ready for it yet. Maybe in the future when things have calmed down, or when they have grown to accept my work, but it has been a great experience - I will be back here next year to see if my art is more acceptable."
11/01/2009
By Luke Hunt
Bangkok Post
At first glance it's obvious. Koke Lor's art has been inspired by the bare-breasted apsaras dancing across the stone walls of Angkor Wat and hundreds of other temples that dot the Cambodian landscape.
He has also taken great pleasure in adding a dash of colour, a smile and a relaxed pose to the ladies in his portraits. In doing so, this Khmer-American artist has breathed some fresh air into an art scene overwhelmed by tradition - and landed himself an inbox full of hate mail.
Cambodia's Minister for Women's Affairs, Ing Kantha Phavy, has drawn comparisons between Lor's art and pornography, telling Spectrum the paintings were a negative reflection of Cambodian culture, values and honour, and like pornography, it was a danger to local youths.
"Most Cambodian women have reacted against these paintings. They cannot accept these paintings," she said, adding the country's powerful Post and Telecommunications Ministry is investigating ways of shutting down Lor's website, reahu.net, named after the art collective of which he is a member.
Cambodia is commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Khmer Rouge this week. Pol Pot, widely renowned for his intolerance of beauty and the annihilation of Khmer culture and apsara dancing, was swept from power by the invading Vietnamese on Jan 7, 1979.
Ten years of Vietnamese occupation followed, and civil war continued until 1998, the year Pol Pot died.
However, the country has also had 11 years of peace and is enjoying a relatively prosperous period during which the arts and education are flourishing amid hopes that a more enlightened era is beckoning. But in Cambodia the killjoys in government are never too far away.
Chuch Phoeurn, the secretary of state for the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, said Lor, like any other artist, had the right to use his imagination, but warned: "It is wrong to paint in order to degrade Cambodian women or apsara dancers."
Essentially, an apsara is a heavenly female figure, or spirit, idolised within Hindu and Buddhist cultures, and any portrayal of the mythical women who serviced the courts of Khmer kings 1,000 years ago is to tinker with the foundations of a culture.
So, when Lor plucks a woman from the ranks of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, grants her a tasteful makeover and transforms a dowdy killer into an attractive apsara with a gun, everybody in Cambodia is going to have an opinion. Especially the likes of Tuol Sleng (the notorious S-21 prison) survivor Vann Nath, who simply said: "We are not happy with these kinds of paintings. They affect the feelings of the victims and do not reflect the truth of that era."
Such attitudes have turned Lor, himself a survivor of the Killing Fields, into something of a recluse.
"To be honest, it does intimidate me," he told Spectrum, "due to the threatening emails I've received.
"You know what people in high places are capable of doing, and they could also slap me with some kind of defamation charges."
When asked about the Khmer Rouge girl, he says: "Yes I did that one. It's my way of dealing with atrocity. I went through the ordeal and it was a painful childhood.
"When it comes to the Khmer Rouge, all you'll hear is bloodshed and the Killing Fields. I've just thrown in a 'What if?"'
Lor's knowledge of the Khmer Rouge is first-hand. As an eight-year-old he fled Cambodia with his family in 1979, as Pol Pot's iron grip over the country was nearing its end and the world began counting the almost two million left dead from the policies imposed by the ultra-Maoists.
The family moved to the US, where Lor earned a degree in engineering with a minor in fine art. He is single and now lives in Chicago where he established a small art collective known as reahu.net with two other Khmer-Americans, Bong T and Chronicle.
"That is how they would like to be known. They are great tattoo artists," Lor said.
Unbeknown to most, Lor spent the 30th anniversary of Pol Pot's overthrow in Cambodia, where he sized-up the reaction to his work, and while there was no shortage of outraged puritans, there was also plenty of support from the local art scene, which readily praised his portraits.
Author Theary Seng, who wrote Daughter of the Killing Fields and is also executive director of the Centre for Social Development in Cambodia, was blunt in her appraisal: "I love it! I want to buy some for my apartment!
"It's exquisitely beautiful in it's celebration of the human body and an adherence to how apsaras were then - naked as depicted.
"His work builds Khmer culture, it doesn't destroy it," she said.
Ms Seng also reserved a few choice words for the critics.
"We are such a hypocritical and blind society to beauty; we call white, black and black, white; we trade the genuine for the synthetic.
"The naysayers tend to be those who appoint themselves as the guardians of Khmer culture, but their response is really just a knee-jerk reaction, and they have limited understanding and appreciation of beauty, aesthetics and culture," she said.
The Cambodian Centre for Human Rights has also taken up Reahu's cause and urged the government to forsake censorship and asked it not to block the Reahu website.
Meanwhile, Peg LeVine from the Melbourne-Phnom Penh based Monash Asia Institute said Lor and Reahu had struck a justifiable chord of restlessness in Cambodian society.
She said the images held a sensual beauty that was beyond question, but added: "It is not the images, per se, that are at issue here. Rather it is the vehemence by which he 'uses' if not abuses the ancestral and culturally-embedded meanings of the apsara."
In this sense she adds the artists associated with Reahu could be proving themselves to be more American-Khmer than Khmer-American.
Writing in the Phnom Penh Post, the French-Cambodian author Somanos Sar said the public outrage over Reahu was more about limits on freedom, rights and responsibilities.
"I would suggest to him that he paint a female Nazi fighter in the same way he has painted the female Khmer Rouge fighter. Maybe he could then feel the frontiers between freedom and responsibility."
Lor is unrepentant and wants Cambodians to look beyond the four walls of home, arguing that at the end of the day pictures cannot damage a culture that is confident in itself.
But given the years of destruction, a notorious culture of impunity and corruption across most levels of Cambodia's bureaucracies and institutions, few would argue that this country's culture is on solid ground.
The government has also proved adept at meddling in the social and private lives of its citizens.
At various times Western music and dance have been banned, curfews imposed, women told to wear skirts below the knee, adultery is an imprisonable offence despite the well-known dalliances of politicians, and marriage between local women and foreigners is regulated.
Lor also told Spectrum that he had considered staging an exhibition of his work in Cambodia, but had decided against it in favour of keeping it on the internet, at least in the short term.
"I don't think Cambodia is ready for it yet. Maybe in the future when things have calmed down, or when they have grown to accept my work, but it has been a great experience - I will be back here next year to see if my art is more acceptable."
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