Collection+ Sopheap Pich

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Sopheap Pich

Collection+

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Collection+

Sopheap Pich

Collection+

Contents

a series of exhibitions drawn from the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection and private and public art collections from Australia, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East

7 Preface Gene Sherman

13 Introduction Michael Young

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

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Internal Technology Erin Gleeson

Sopheap Pich Curated by SCAF and Erin Gleeson

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An interview with Sopheap Pich Dolla S. Merrillees

4 October – 14 December 2013

28 Process Images

49 Colour Plates

SCAF Project 19

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List of Works

80 Sopheap Pich: Biography

81 Contributors

87 Acknowledgements

Preface Gene Sherman Chairman and Executive Director Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Collection+ has been envisaged from the start as a series.

Each exhibition is devoted to a single artist selected from the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection and is curated via a sole eye, mind and heart.

Across the series, achieving a generational, geographical, gender, nationality and sensibility mix among curators is our goal.

Their backgrounds may be museum-related, they may be plucked from academe, cutting-edge government-funded spaces or international art schools, they may well be chosen from the film, literary, architecture or fashion worlds. Their key expertise will be a keen eye, a demonstrated knowledge of visual practice history, an original mind and the willingness to write without fear or favour.

The series took off with flair and undeniable panache. Doug Hall selected Chiharu Shiota’s Dialogue with Absence, 2010, and with assistant curator Aaron de Souza, manager of the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, unearthed a surprising number of Shiota’s works in private collections in Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney, plus two early video works from the artist’s studio. Unrelated, geographically dispersed collectors had focused attention on and committed funds to one Japanese, Berlin-based, mid-generation woman artist. A magical vignette show was mounted, comprising works on paper, sculpture, installation and video.

Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich was initially selected for this second exhibition in the series by Michael Desmond, former Senior Curator and then Deputy Director, Programs and Collections, at Canberra’s National

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Portrait Gallery. Michael had to relinquish the usual ongoing curator role due to pressing commitments, and the cultural detective work became a shared task. Erin Gleeson, Artistic Director of SA SA BASSAC in Phnom Penh, Dolla Merrillees, SCAF’s Associate Director, and myself formed an active curatorium, to which the artist provided valuable assistance. Research, given sufficient time, is my idea of fun, and we have enjoyed a fascinating ride, equal in flavour, if not in detail, to a Sherlock Holmes adventure.

I initially became aware of Sopheap Pich’s work at the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art. I remember the work vividly and can picture the room and the individual placements. Circling around the clustered pieces several times, I was bemused at my reaction. Abstract work doesn’t usually elicit the same depth of emotional response from me (or from Brian, my husband) as does, in any medium, work more corporeal.

We own people-related or people-suggestive paintings, photographs, installations and moving image work by many Pan-Asian artists, including: from Australia, Shaun Gladwell, Bill Henson, Mike Parr, Daniel Crooks, Tim Silver, Christian Thompson, Michael Cook, William Yang and Guan Wei; from Asia, Zhang Huan, Song Dong, Lin Tianmiao, Ai Weiwei, Yang Fudong, Do Ho Suh, Dadang Christanto, Heri Dono, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, and Dinh Q. Lê.

Language, text and books represent a second seam that traverses our forty-five year long collecting journey. Some of the same names crop up, though the works, of course, differ: Shaun Gladwell, William Yang and Lin Tianmiao represent overlaps. Other text-based or book-related works include those by Xu Bing (most importantly), Imants Tillers, Simryn Gill, Daido Moriyama and seminal work by Jitish Kallat and Yang Zhichao.

Nature and the landscape make intermittent appearances but don’t feature prominently – Janet Laurence and Philip Wolfhagen come to mind. An important strand relates to work by outback Aboriginal artists. Sometimes viewed as pure, glorious abstraction, these works, few in number but significant in presence, are, as we know, deeply rooted in experience of country and place.

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Perhaps the last central theme weaving through the years of art viewing, reviewing, research and acquisition is textiles. Garments of all kinds feature: cloth, saris standing in for womanly forms (Bharti Kher), headscarves cloaking unseen faces (Lynne Roberts-Goodwin) and mirrored surfaces sending back reflections of both clothed and unclothed bodies (Pinaree Sanpitak). Abstraction per se is conspicuously absent.

So why, then, was I attracted to Sopheap Pich? I realised over time that it was the materiality of the work that captivated. Made of bamboo and rattan, the apparently intellectually driven abstract forms were neither welded nor cast. No structural steel, no dipped or evenly-sprayed colour paint echoing early off-the-plinth work by Anthony Caro and his many disciples, had been used. Moulded plastic, cast bronze, indeed man-made materials of any kind, were absent. Sopheap uses humble materials grown in soil, materials from his home environment, the place where he played as a child and where nature largely provided what was necessary to live and to survive.

As time went on, the forms, too, took on new meaning for me. I came to see a close relationship between the artist’s chosen shapes and the organs of the human body. Out of initially perceived abstract forms, hearts, lungs and bladders appeared as if by miraculous transference. I later learned that during his early years in the United States the artist, strongly encouraged by his father, had planned to study medicine. Other forms relating to bombs and warfare provide strong reminders of the Khmer Rouge terror, which coincide with the artist’s childhood memories. The corporeal references combined with the pull of the earth led us to acquire two splendid works and to follow Sopheap Pich’s evolving body of work and deeply deserved fame with profound pleasure.

For Collection+, the detective work took our curatorium far afield. Our lenders include public galleries (Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art) and private collections in Brisbane, Sydney, London and Cambodia. I would like to thank Dolla Merrillees, Aaron de Souza and Erin Gleeson for their creative curatorial input and cohesive management.

Working à quatre (or in this case, including the artist, à cinque) requires special collaborative skills.

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Sopheap Pich was selected by curator Carolyn ChristovBakargiev for dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and for a solo exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich, 2013, was part of the Museum’s contribution to New York’s Season of Cambodia, held from April to May 2013. Season of Cambodia Visual Art Program Co-curator, Erin Gleeson, graciously accepted our request to write the essay for this catalogue, as did Michael Young, visual arts writer and contributing editor to Art Asia Pacific.

Dr Michael Brand, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, brings his interest in, and knowledge of, Cambodia to the table. We are thrilled that he has agreed to open the exhibition.

During the exhibition, Sopheap Pich will join a small group of deeply engaged collectors in Sydney. Our interactions with him will no doubt help us better understand the work. His presence will certainly help us celebrate the moment. Given his current and ongoing commitments worldwide, we are deeply grateful that he found time to attend an exhibition whose primary focus is a little unusual. For a brief moment, collector and artist stand shoulder to shoulder: the story of art has, it is hoped, been broadened and deepened.

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Introduction Michael Young Visual arts writer

In 1979, when he was eight years old, Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich and his family fled their homeland on foot to escape the genocidal regime of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

From 1975 until they were ousted by Vietnam in 1979, the Khmer Rouge ruled by terror; executions and torture were commonplace as Pol Pot pushed the country towards an idealised utopian agrarian society.

No-one was immune from the arbitrary slaughter inflicted by the violent cadres. Artists, writers, actors and intellectuals were targeted, but even peasants foraging for wild food in the famine-ravaged country, or anyone wearing spectacles and thus possibly educated, could be hauled off for summary execution.

Schools, hospitals and factories were closed, private property was confiscated and money was abolished as the population was forced onto collective urban farms. All forms of artistic expression were brutally suppressed and most of the country’s books, manuscripts and paintings were destroyed. The cultural and intellectual infrastructure of the country was virtually eradicated.

An exodus of biblical proportions ensued; a million people fled the country, while of those who remained, 1.7 million died.

Initially, the Pich family sought refuge in the camps that had sprung up on the Thai border. They then moved to a United Nations refugee camp further inland, where they stayed for four years before being accepted for re-settlement in America. On the way to America they spent eight months in the Philippines, where Pich attended school

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for the first time and experienced what he has described as his first real taste of freedom.1 Pich was educated at the University of Massachusetts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He had always wanted to be a painter but was under pressure from his father – who had dreamed himself of being a doctor – to study medicine. Pich enrolled in a pre-med course at the University of Massachusetts before majoring in art during his second year of college.

At the close of the millennium Pich was fending off poverty while struggling to establish himself as an artist in Boston. These circumstances influenced his decision to return to Cambodia in 2002. ‘The political situation felt as though it was good enough. It seemed as though it was the right time, but how do you ever really know?’ he says.2 Pich’s arrival in Phnom Penh coincided with the decade that witnessed the country struggling to re-establish its cultural identity within the straitjacket imposed by poverty and a deeply conservative environment.

‘In 2002 there was no contemporary art in Cambodia other than a couple of young artists – Chath Piersath and Leang Seckon – making what I considered to be contemporary art,’ Pich says.

But on the ground in Phnom Penh things were happening; veteran Cambodian painter and writer Vann Nath was collaborating with filmmaker Rithy Panh on the documentary S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003). It focused on the infamous Khmer Rouge Tuol Sleng prison, the interrogation, intelligence and torture centre of the Khmer Rouge where Vann Nath had been incarcerated for a year. At the time of the Khmer Rouge’s defeat only seven prisoners left the prison alive. Vann Nath was one of them.

Panh, who had also escaped from Cambodia to Vietnam in 1979, established the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh in 2005, with a mission to discover and collect the sounds and images of Cambodian memory.

An independent performing arts sector began to emerge in Phnom Penh during the 1990s and 2000s. Shadow puppeteer Mann Kosal set up Sovanna Phum in 1994 and a group of returnees from a refugee camp

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in Thailand established Phare Ponleu Selapak with a focus on circus and the visual arts. Beginning in 1999, choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro introduced new energy and ideas into classical dance, which led to her co-founding Khmer Arts in 2002. Amrita Performing Arts was established in 2003 as a producer of traditional and experimental dance and theatre productions. The first national film festivals took place in the early 1990s.

By 2004 Pich had rejected the limitations of painting and was grappling with large three-dimensional biomorphic forms made from rattan and bamboo: materials that resonated with memories of his childhood environment.

Subsequently, Pich’s refinement of his oeuvre has propelled him onto the international art stage. He has exhibited at the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane (2006) and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), and early in 2013 he had a solo show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the city-wide Season of Cambodia: A Living Arts Festival.

Within such an international context, whether or not his art should be considered distinctly Cambodian is a moot point. Pich himself prefers not to view it in such terms: ‘I don’t have a clear understanding of Cambodian art. I am an international person. Internationalism is doing what you can with whatever you have.’

Today, Pich is positive about the contemporary art scene in Cambodia: ‘Many young artists are displaying a real passion for what they are doing. They seem to have lightness and optimism about them, which I think is very new.’

1. Olivia Sand, ‘Sopheap Pich’, Asian Art Newspaper, April 2013, p. 1.

2. All direct quotes are taken from a telephone conversation between the author and the artist in August 2013.

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Internal Technology Erin Gleeson Artistic Director SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh

Sopheap Pich made his first sculpture in 2004: a small, unassuming work exhibited in one of Cambodia’s few galleries. He roughly fastened thin strips of rattan together with knots of metal wire to create a biomorphic shape resembling a pair of lungs. Rattan was the everyday material of Cambodia’s predominately rural population; its utilitarian identity oscillated between purposeful and useless, but here it was bravely being used as art. Within the local landscape of contemporary art, this was the first such explicit appropriation of material. Initially, Pich treated the sculpture like a stretcher, blanketing it with a series of unfolded cigarette packs he had been collecting; at the time, ideas of surface and image defined his practice as a trained painter. In the early hours of the morning on the day of the exhibition opening, the artist, after a sleepless night, took the advice of a friend and removed this covering. I remember standing before the resulting work as it hung alone on a relatively large white wall under a spotlight. The cast shadow of its rough lines projected the semblance of a ribcage; the sculpture seemed to both breathe and trap breath. Pich titled it Silence.

A decade has passed since that first unexpected sculpture. In Pich’s evolving practice both the abstract and the representational emerge: multivalent voluminous forms, coiled dogs, unfurling Buddhas, tiered candles, sinuous flowers, stacked bombshells and the curvilinear Khmer alphabet – many iterations of a complex past, palpable in a complex present. Pich’s sculpture is autobiographical, but it is far from bound to narrative. While most critical attention focuses on his references to the legacies of war, he is equally affected by memories – from within the confines of war, even the labour

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camp – of earnest and creative experiences making things. His father played a part in fostering a sense of his childhood innocence by keeping him busy with activities similar to those that children in the Cambodian countryside would enjoy under peaceful circumstances. In doing so, Pich’s father imparted in the artist a love for material and an attention to detail. Along with helping his father to cast metal utensils, Pich learned to handcraft and use toys and hunting equipment, such as clay marbles, wooden spinning tops, bamboo slingshots and fishing rods. He remembers: ‘It wasn't the subject that mattered. I always wanted to look at the technique and how it was done.’1 This preoccupation has persisted in his practice as an artist.

Indeed, Pich’s works reflect both the material of the form and the form of the material. Early on, he explained that the meaning of his works lie not only in their ability to ‘resonate with their environment and the stories they tell of past journeys’ but equally in ‘their process of coming into being’2 or, in other words, their labour. This essay foregrounds labour as a way of reading Pich’s ‘work’, and examines the overlapping themes of materials and processes, place and history.

Sopheap Pich, Silence, 2004 Rattan, wire 46 x 26 x 53 cm Image courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

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Pich’s is a rural-derived labour that uses the common materials and patterns of resourcefulness from the place where he works.

In Cambodia, past and present livelihoods are often one and the same, and have remained sustainable for centuries until very recent economies and technologies have forced change. Asked early in 2013 if his work was place-specific, Pich answered: ‘Everyone [in Cambodia] is working. No-one is sitting around contemplating the universe. I want labour. I want the labour to be the thinking.’3 Pich’s organisation of labour is based on a master–artisan model, which remains a living (if weakening) tradition throughout Cambodia, whether in silk and cotton weaving, wood and stone statuary carving, or ceremonial and functional metalwork. The artist’s studio is just outside Phnom Penh, connected to the bustling capital by a rapidly industrialising road that runs parallel to his small, quiet, red dirt pathway. The expansive, open-air warehouse stands on the banks of the Mekong River. Ten men

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contribute to running the studio, primarily through individual work; around half have specialties while the others are in training. In near silence, they apply their skills at various stations as part of a respectful hierarchy, and share a rhythm of slow and repetitive movements. Quite naturally, the studio has become somewhat of a farm. A herb garden and fruit trees provide parts of communal meals. Dogs and cats roam freely while ponds house turtles and koi fish. New hens will soon be laying eggs.

I am drawn to consider Pich’s labour as archaic; not in the sense of being backwards or out of sync with its time or place, and not in a ‘retro’ sense of self-consciously ‘acting’ the past. Rather, I relate ‘archaic’ here to its root meaning, ‘to begin’. If we reduce Pich’s practice to nouns and verbs we conjure a picture of the beginning of not only his patterns but those of humanity: harvesting, splitting and burning trees and reeds, digging earth, pounding rock, sifting pigment. His primary tools are the hands, the body, knives and fire. His primary materials, bamboo and rattan, once cut, quickly regenerate. With axes, Pich’s team harvests the hard bamboo, and while they purchase the relatively pliable rattan to avoid its painful network of thorns, even this is laborious as each cane must be carefully selected, one by one, up to hundreds at a time, then reshaped back at the studio to correspond to the form it will take. The thick grasses are split numerous times, then shaved with a small razorblade and cooked in diesel to halt water retention and repel insects. This results in long lines of bamboo and rattan – ever-present in the studio, in waiting or in use – overlapping to create orthogonal lattices. To form each joint, knots are made with premeasured inches of varnished wire, resulting in naturally unequal handmade squares. The grid is Pich’s constant: it is structure, it becomes surface and pattern and, more recently, it has become form itself.

One of the many tensions in Pich’s work is that between mechanised and manual forms. First apprehensions of his grids can indeed read as digital renderings, something born of mathematics. ‘To see it emerge instead from the material itself is like pulling reality into the space of the mind. When one sees these objects, one sees things that are emerging from a craft and a relationship with the will and the needs of the materials,

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and at the same time metaphysical, philosophical, and ontologically established objects.’4 Pich’s grids refuse ‘technological miracles’.5 Instead, they are wedded to their archaic, intuitive, systematic knowledge – their internal technology – and distanced from their logical appropriation within industrialised notions of progress.

Guided by his sensibility for, and exposure to, a limited range of vernacular materials, the artist’s increasing tendency to use burlap (hessian) as surface, beeswax as medium, and earth pigments and charcoal as colour, offers a strong sense of corporeality within his work. His grids become private topographies. Pich travels across his homeland, filling his pick-up truck with colourful earth. In the north-eastern mountainous regions of Ratanakiri he finds an oxidised yellow dust, while the clay from the south coast in Kompong Som has taro hints. The country’s central national park, Kirirom, offers a burnt red. The deep black cooking charcoal is sold on the streets of Phnom Penh by vendors in mobile carts, while his neighbour on the river conveniently sells beeswax, which is used mostly as a binding medium.

It is the relationships – in infinite combinations with the grid and with one another – that excite the artist about these materials. There is always the experience of discovery and beginnings. Pich first used burlap to encase the sculpture Jayavarman VII, 2007, the form of which referred to the cast of the head of the twelfth century Buddhist king, whose rare compassionate rule, with his wife Indradevi, included the provision of free hospitals, among other civic acts. Burlap, originally used as sacking for uncooked rice, is sourced from a local market then washed multiple times and treated with a glue to adjust its consistency before being hung to dry. Each sack is deliberately picked for its used character; the burlap often carries markings and stitches, which Pich generally preserves, inspired by their colour and texture. Bright green spray paint, pale yellow plastic stitches, or patches of krama (the ubiquitous Khmer scarf), left largely unchanged, are allowed to speak for themselves. To the artist, these traces embody numerous symbols, becoming ‘noise, many lives together, like insects, or stars.’6 Cocoon, 2011, the double layer of which recalls Echo, 2004, was Pich’s first use of beeswax. Symbolic of self-made new beginnings, cocoons

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are constructed in such a way that they can be escaped. Hanging Around, 2011, his first use of charcoal, was born of a rare idle moment in the studio.

I feel I am going back further and further, learning how to walk again, and this time I trace my steps and determine how much density they might put on a surface. Like a worm who one day realised he’s a worm and cannot do a whole lot. His function is to create soil and make it rich.7 Pich layers and complicates histories and notions of labour, both local and universal. His work remains ever relevant, as increases in automation and information technology expand exploitative forms of labour in a traditionally rural economy, and as governments, non-governmental organisations and popular media perpetuate images of trauma and posttrauma as these relate to Cambodia. This is a nation where earth is being stolen, industrialised and consumed, and where a new generation of local artists are gravitating to new media. Pich refuses to engage with this context directly, explaining that increasingly his interest is in ‘what reveals itself to me, inside the studio, rather than in making direct references to politics and the world outside.’ Pich’s technology is internal, the quiet of the non-machine, the intuition of hands and the mind at work: ‘Work is a way for me to focus. Work has a way of moving forward in the midst of all the complication.’8

Sopheap Pich, Jayavarman VII, 2007 Rattan, wire, burlap, glass 50 x 57 x 31 cm Image courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

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1. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ‘Live like a frog and die like a snake: Conversations with Sopheap Pich’, in Sopheap Pich, Sculptures 2004–2013, monograph, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, USA, 2013, p. 14.

2. SH Contemporary 08: The Asia Pacific Contemporary Art Fair, exhibition catalogue, SH Contemporary, Shanghai, China, 2008.

3. The artist in conversation with John Guy, ‘Conversation: Sunday at the Met’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14 April 2013, a Season of Cambodia event.

4. Christov-Bakargiev, op. cit., p. 18.

5. A reference to Robert Smithson’s relevant essay, ‘A sedimentation of the mind: Earth projects’, 1968.

6. Christov-Bakargiev, op. cit., p. 18.

7. Sopheap Pich in conversation with Erin Gleeson, 26 July 2013.

8. Christov-Bakargiev, op. cit., p. 11.

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An Interview with Sopheap Pich Dolla S. Merrillees Associate Director Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation This edited interview with Sopheap Pich was conducted by Dolla S. Merrillees through email exchanges in July 2013

You spent your childhood living under the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge, helping your parents make fish traps in order to survive. How has this background influenced your use of materials and your art-making process?

Sopheap Pich: I spent a lot of time making toys, traps and hunting devices by hand. It gave me a necessary outlet for survival and also helped to pass time.

When I first started using rattan to make sculptures, I was reminded of the adventures I had as a kid. I try to approach my new works with the same curiosity and openness to possibility. Aside from their useful qualities, bamboo and rattan are also very satisfying to work by hand and the simple techniques I employ allow for complex shapes and thoughts to come through.

As an artist who returned to your country of birth in 2002, after living and studying in the United States, do you feel compelled to address the political, social and economic context in which you now find yourself?

Politics seeps into my life everywhere I go. There are layers of politics that one cannot avoid in Cambodia. I try not to let things I cannot control interfere, but there are social and psychological factors that come into the work and I welcome them. I don’t think I could have made my works of the last ten years anywhere else in the world.

Contemporary Cambodia is a nation undergoing rapid development and urbanisation, with many Cambodians having to reconstruct notions of self, family and history.

Is your use of local raw materials – burlap, dirt, charcoal, Dolla S. Merrillees:

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bamboo and beeswax – a response to this? A way of weaving together or piecing together what remains?

I think so. I use a modern language to make my work but the materials I use are what I find here, and can be seen as local or more traditional. It didn’t start out as a conscious decision. I love all these materials and they seem to work well together.

You studied Fine Arts in Painting at the University of Massachusetts and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You‘ve said that ‘Since my first class with [the late painter] Ray Yoshida in Chicago, I’ve been looking for the “noise” in painting’.1 Can you explain what you mean by this and how this relates to your sculptural practice?

In a painting there are many elements that do not immediately present themselves for the eye to find. The ‘noise’ that Ray referred to was composed of not just the other possibilities of reading a painting but also those nameless energies that one might feel emanating from it. From Ray I learned that one can – or should – see beyond the apparent narrative and look for something else, such as the abstract possibilities in a painting. The same can be said for sculptures.

The French colonial legacy of Beaux-Arts classicism has remained strong in both Cambodia and Vietnam postindependence.2 Was your shift away from painting after your return to Phnom Penh a deliberate questioning of these conventional notions of fine art-making?

I think the notion or definition of Khmer art was certainly floating in my mind at the time, but rather than something as specific as Beaux-Arts it was really a question of what it took to quiet the mind after coming back to Cambodia as a person who had spent half his life in a first-world country and received his education there. In making sculpture with bamboo and rattan, I had to work slowly for eight to ten hours a day, most of the time in almost total silence. The physical demands of building, for example, a 4-metre-long sculpture are just one example of the many departures from painting.

Pamela Corey states that your abstract sculptural forms introduced a type of modernist aesthetic to the Cambodian

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contemporary art community.3 Do you agree? How important is it for you as an artist to experiment with form, process and materials?

When I arrived in Phnom Penh in November 2002, there were only a couple of artists making what I considered ‘contemporary’ art; the type of art that speaks of the maker, the individual. So, for me, it was a clean slate and I could set out to help make what would become the contemporary art history of Cambodia. It wasn’t something I planned to do, but through sculpture I was able to find my way in art. It just so happened that, after some time, people took notice of what I was doing. After a while it became a matter of discipline. It was also important for me to go through the process of finding my materials. That gave me a voice; but to grow as a person and an artist, it is necessary to follow art wherever it takes me.

Life experiences and shared memories are important in your practice. Collective memory can manifest itself in various guises; a memorial, a museum or even a flag. What is the relationship between the arts and cultural memory?

Do you feel that matter and material embody memory or is it the shapes, the form itself, that viewers respond to?

When people saw my early works they were astonished by the amount of labour that went into them, but they were also puzzled by my choice of bodily organs as forms and by the grand scale they were made in. With the very first group of sculptures that I made, I found the materials that I still work with now.

I remain fascinated by them to this day, and through them, somehow, the public has found a way to connect with the work. Forms evolve over time in ways that have to do with my journey and development as an artist. Sometimes they are easy for people to identify with; at other times they are perhaps more difficult.

1. Elaine W. Ng, ‘Where I work: Sopheap Pich’, Art Asia Pacific, vol. 78, May/June 2012.

2. John Guy, ‘Cambodian rattan’, Orientation, May 2013.

3. Pamela Corey in Phnom Penh: Rescue Archaeology / Contemporary Art and Urban Change in Cambodia, exhibition catalogue, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Berlin, Germany, 2013, p. 115.

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Page 29: Sopheap Pich during the bamboo harvest near Phnom Penh Pages 30–47: Process images from the artist’s studio

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Collection+ Sopheap Pich

List of Works

Pages 2–3, 50–55: Cocoon 2, 2011 Rattan, wire, burlap, beeswax, earth pigment 191 x 85 x 75 cm Collection: Gene & Brian Sherman, Sydney, Australia Photo: Brett Boardman

Pages 70–71: Echo, 2008 Rattan, wire 260 x 65 x 105 cm Collection: Urban Art Projects, Brisbane, Australia Photo: Roger d’Souza

Pages 56–59: Hanging Around, 2011 Rattan, wire, beeswax, burlap, charcoal 167 x 30 x 11 cm Collection: Gene & Brian Sherman, Sydney, Australia Photo: Brett Boardman

Pages 72: Untitled (Shadows and Light), 2012 Bamboo, rattan, burlap, plastic, wire, charcoal, beeswax, damar resin 30 x 30 x 6 cm Collection: Yvon Chalm, Paris, France / Phnom Penh, Cambodia Image courtesy the artist

Pages 60–67: Seated Buddha, 2011 Rattan, bamboo, wire, plywood 256 x 220 x 110 cm Collection: The Franks-Suss Collection, London, Hong Kong, Sydney Photo: Brett Boardman Pages 68–69: Machine (from ‘1979’ series), 2009 Bamboo, rattan, wire, copper wire, burlap, dye 243 x 108 x 108 cm Purchased 2010 with funds from the Estate of Lawrence F. King in memory of the late Mr and Mrs S. W. King through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia Photo: Natasha Harth, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art

Pages 73: Five Unequal Parts, 2012 Rattan, bamboo, wire, burlap, earth pigments, beeswax, charcoal, damar resin 100 x 100 x 6 cm Collection: Christoph Bendick, Phnom Penh, Cambodia Image courtesy the artist Pages 74–75: Sleeping Animal, 2011 Rattan, wire 60 x 40 x 25 cm Collection: Christoph Bendick, Phnom Penh, Cambodia Photo: Christoph Bendick

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Page 76: Buddha, 2010 Woodblock print, water-based ink on Arches Rives paper (ed. 14/25) 57 x 77 cm Collection: Larry Strange, Phnom Penh, Cambodia Image courtesy the artist Page 77: Buddha (from ‘1979’ series), 2009 Rattan, wire, dye 220 x 110 x 30 cm Purchased 2010 with funds from the Estate of Lawrence F. King in memory of the late Mr and Mrs S. W. King through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia Photo: Natasha Harth, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art

Contributors

Sopheap Pich

Sopheap Pich is widely considered to be Cambodia’s most internationally prominent contemporary artist. Working primarily with thin strips of rattan and bamboo, he creates sculptural forms that address issues of time, memory and the body, often relating to Cambodia’s history, particularly with regard to his recollections of life during the Khmer Rouge period (1975–79), and its culture – both its ancient traditions and contemporary struggles.

Pich’s work stands out for its subtlety and power, combining refinement of form with a visceral, emotive force. After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts in the United States, Pich returned to Cambodia in 2002, where he began working with local materials – bamboo, rattan, burlap from rice bags, beeswax and earth pigments gathered from around Cambodia – to make sculptural forms that reference social and political conditions in Cambodia. His childhood experiences during the genocidal conditions of Cambodia in the late 1970s had a lasting

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impact on his work, informing its themes of survival, family, and basic human togetherness.

Pich’s work has been featured in numerous international museum exhibitions and biennials in Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States.

Pich’s work was recently featured in a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 23 February to 7 July 2013. Entitled Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich, the exhibition featured ten sculptures from recent years, ranging from large-scale, organic forms to the grid-like wall reliefs shown in his 2012 installation at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany. The exhibition included loans from private collections as well as works from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Pich’s recent solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, entitled Reliefs (18 April – 14 June 2013), featured new works from the wall reliefs series.

Dr Gene Sherman AM is Chairman and Executive Director of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. She has a specialised knowledge of art, literary theory and French and English literature and spent seventeen years teaching, researching and lecturing at secondary and tertiary levels. As Director of Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) she organised up to twenty-two exhibitions annually, including regional, national and international touring exhibitions. Gene and Brian Sherman have sponsored a Master of Fine Arts Administration student at the College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales (1997–2007), a studio at Bundanon and a contemporary Australian art-research room at the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library, The University of Sydney. They have also funded The University of New South Wales postgraduate studio complex at the Gateway@COFA campus. Dr Sherman is currently Deputy Chair of the National Portrait Gallery Board, Canberra; a member of the Australian Institute of Art History Board at the University of Melbourne, the Art & Australia

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Advisory Board, the International Association of Art Critics and the Tate Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee; and serves as an Asialink Asia Literacy Ambassador. She regularly lectures to a wide range of institutions on topics such as gallery management, the art of collecting, philanthropy, private foundations, Australian and Asian contemporary art, and contemporary Japanese fashion. Dr Sherman was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government (2003) and a Doctorate of Letters honoris causa by The University of Sydney (2008). She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010 for her cultural philanthropy and her support of emerging and established artists.

Contributors

Michael Young is a freelance visual arts writer, journalist and media consultant. He is currently Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation’s communications adviser. With a focus on Asian art, artist profiles, exhibition reviews and online blogs, he is a contributing editor and frequent writer for Art Asia Pacific and writes regularly for Asian Art Newspaper and other publications.

He has worked as a journalist in London (The Times), Melbourne (The Herald Sun) and Sydney (The Sydney Morning Herald) and has published two books. He studied art history at the University of London.

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Erin Gleeson is a curator and writer. She co-founded and is Artistic Director of SA SA BASSAC, an exhibition and residency space and reading room dedicated to curating, archiving and mediating contemporary visual culture in and from Cambodia. Since 2005, Gleeson has curated over forty exhibitions with Cambodian artists and partnered with numerous individuals, galleries and institutions to extend their practices regionally and internationally. Her projects in 2013 include creating the film Fruit Picnic for Guggenheim UBS MAPS Global Art Initiative, co-curating New York City’s Season of Cambodia Visual Art Program ‘In Residence’, co-curating the Singapore Biennale, and producing the book and exhibition Phnom Penh: Rescue Archaeology at ifa-Galerie, Berlin and Stuttgart. She has lectured extensively, including with: Asia Art Archive; Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong; Artsonje Center, Seoul; 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York; Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore; and Tokyo Wonder Site. She was a 2012 nominee for the Independent Curators International Independent Vision Curatorial Award and a 2013 Foundation for Arts Initiatives grantee.

Erin Gleeson is from Minneapolis and moved to Cambodia in 2002 on a Fulbright Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship awarded by the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center. She is based between Phnom Penh and Berlin.

Dolla S. Merrillees is Associate Director, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

Previously she worked as Director – Visual Arts, Museums and Galleries NSW and as Exhibition Manager for the 2000 and 2002 Biennales of Sydney. As Assistant Curator, Decorative Arts and Design at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and Curator of Contemporary Craft at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, she contributed to projects such as 4 + 1:5 Contemporary Australian Designs, 1999, Contemporary Australian Craft, 1998, and Alvar Aalto: Points of Contact, 1996. She is the recipient of two Ian Potter Foundation Cultural Grants (1997; 2001) and in 2013 was awarded a Second Book Fellowship by Varuna: The Writer’s House. Over the course of her career she has provided specialist advice to the not-for-profit sector on strategic planning, exhibition development and tours, programming and fundraising. She has written extensively for print and online media. Writing projects include The Woodcutter’s Wife, 2007 and ‘Blood brain barrier’ in Blood: Trunk Series, 2013. She is currently working on her second book.

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Gene & Brian Sherman Collection

Acknowledgements

As a second-generation collector, Gene Sherman’s interest in acquiring art stems from her father, who avidly collected not only South African art of his generation but also a modest group of European and American works on paper. Following their marriage in 1968, Gene and Brian continued to visit galleries and meet artists and, with a minimal budget, created the beginnings of what was to become a substantial private art collection.

Upon moving to Australia in 1976, the Shermans temporarily stopped collecting art for financial reasons. In 1985, with the international success of Brian Sherman and Laurence Freedman’s Equitilink financial management firm and the establishment of Sherman Galleries under Gene’s direction, the couple was once again in a position to acquire art and the collection grew in leaps and bounds.

Now numbering over 800 works, the central focus of the collection became significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.

Comprising painting, sculpture, photography, large-scale installation and video works, the collection includes, inter alia, major international artists such as Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo Qiang, Dinh Q. Lê, Shaun Gladwell and William Kentridge. The collection continues to grow with the acquisition of monumental installation works by Jitish Kallat, Lin Tianmiao, Chiharu Shiota and Ken and Julia Yonetani. Works from the collection have been exhibited at major national and international institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).

SCAF thanks the artist, Sopheap Pich, his studio staff, and all at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York.

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Thank you to Erin Gleeson for her thoughtful essay and her significant contribution to this exhibition as part of the curatorial team.

Thanks also to the SA SA BASSAC team: Chanveasha Chum, Meta Moang, Dara Kong We gratefully acknowledge the following collectors who have so generously lent their artworks for inclusion in this exhibition: Christoph Bendick Yvon Chalm Simon Franks, Franks-Suss Collection Larry Strange Daniel Tobin, Urban Art Projects Matthew Tobin, Urban Art Projects Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art The following individuals have provided invaluable assistance with this project: Tamar Arnon and Eli Zagury, Franks-Suss Collection Michael Brand, Art Gallery of New South Wales Mark Carnegie Brian Curtin Kim Powell, IAS Fine Art Logistics Annette Shun Wah Simm Steel Russell Storer, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art Michael Young Heartfelt thanks also to the Nelson Meers Foundation for its continuing support of SCAF’s Culture+Ideas programme.

Thank you to Johnnie Walker, A.R.T., Tokyo, for his wise and sensitive advice.

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We are eternally grateful to Brian Sherman for his focused, passionate and unwavering support of SCAF’s activities.

Previous Exhibitions

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

2008

2012

Project 1

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction In partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Project 2

Jonathan Jones: Untitled (The Tyranny of Distance) Project 3

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) was established in April 2008 as a not-for-profit organisation to champion research, education and exhibitions of significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, the AsiaPacific region and the Middle East. SCAF works closely with artists in commissioning new work and developing exhibitions that energise and respond to the gallery’s four-part complex comprising a large exhibition area, mini ‘outsite’ space, versatile theatre annexe and Zen garden. Extensive projects are developed through partnerships with public art institutions at a regional, state and national level while broad public engagement with contemporary art is fostered through publishing and forum programmes. In addition, Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR), located directly across the road from the gallery, offers a supportive environment and accommodation for visiting artists, filmmakers, architects, writers, curators and scholars. The experience of developing Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) as a respected

commercial and educational enterprise within the international art world underpins the Foundation at both a conceptual and practical level. Dr Gene Sherman AM, SCAF Chairman and Executive Director, drew on her extensive international networks to establish the Foundation, and initiates and guides its activities in collaboration with an advisory board of respected peers: Andrew Cameron, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Sam Meers, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts and Michael Whitworth.

SCAF is a member of CIMAM, the International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art.

Jitish Kallat: Aquasaurus 2009 Project 4

The View from Elsewhere In partnership with Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Project 5

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Project 6

Charwei Tsai: Water, Earth and Air

Janet Laurence: After Eden Project 14

Alfredo Juan Aquilizan and Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan In-Habit: Project Another Country Project 15

Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture In partnership with National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 2013 Project 16

Fugitive Structures 2013 / Andrew Burns: Crescent House In association with BVN Donovan Hill Olafur Eliasson: The Cubic Structural Evolution Project Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Project 17

2010 Project 7

Fiona Tan: Coming Home In association with National Art School, Sydney Project 8

Brook Andrew: The Cell In association with Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane Project 9

Contemporary Art for Contemporary Kids In partnership with Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2011 Project 10

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge Project 11

Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure Project 12

Tokujin Yoshioka: Waterfall

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Project 13

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Collection+: Chiharu Shiota Curated by Doug Hall AM Project 18

Feel & Think: A New Era of Tokyo Fashion In association with National Art School, Sydney For project details, visit sherman-scaf.org.au

Collection+ Sopheap Pich Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 4 October – 14 December 2013 SCAF Project 19 Published by © Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Chairman, Executive Director Dr Gene Sherman AM Associate Director Dolla S. Merrillees Exhibitions Manager Michael Moran Manager – Gene & Brian Sherman Collection Aaron de Souza Communications and Events Coordinator Sophie Holvast Projects Coordinator Danielle Devery Executive Assistant to Gene Sherman Hannah Brunskill

Copyright in the text is held by the authors. Copyright in the images is held by the artist unless otherwise indicated.

Exhibition and Catalogue Management Dolla S. Merrillees and Michael Moran

The material in this publication is under copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. Where applicable, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and acknowledge the source material. Errors or omissions are unintentional.

Advisory Board Andrew Cameron, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Sam Meers, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts, Michael Whitworth Communications Adviser Michael Young

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Pich, Sopheap, artist.

Title: Collection +: Sopheap Pich / Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation; curated by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and Erin Gleeson.

ISBN: 978-0-9807763-9-3 (pbk) Subjects: Pich, Sopheap - Exhibitions.

Sherman, Brian - Art collections - Exhibitions.

Sherman, Gene - Art collections - Exhibitions.

Sculptors - Cambodia - Exhibitions.

Sculpture - Cambodia - Exhibitions.

Art - Private collections - Australia - Exhibitions.

Other Authors/Contributors: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, issuing body, author.

Dewey Number: 708.99441

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street, Paddington Sydney NSW 2021 Australia ABN 25 122 280 200 sherman-scaf.org.au

Culture+Ideas proudly supported by

Design Mark Gowing Design Editor Fiona Egan Proofreader Marni Williams Process photography Gregory Galligan, Thai Art Archives, Bangkok: pp. 34–35 Erin Gleeson: p. 29 Stéphane Janin: pp. 30–33, 36–37, 40–41, 46–47 Be Takerng Pattanopas: pp. 42–45 Sopheap Pich studio: pp. 38–39 Printed in Australia by Ligare Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation providing a platform for innovative visual artists primarily from Asia, Australia and the Pacific Rim. All donations over $2 are tax deductible and will support our exhibition, educational, public and artist-in-residence programmes.