Sopheap Pich is widely considered one of Cambodia’s best-known contemporary artists, although he moved with his family to the United States in 1984. After receiving his BFA (University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1995) and MFA in painting (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), he returned to Cambodia in 2002. In 2003, he established the artist group Saklapel and launched the acclaimed exhibition Visual Art Open (2005) in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, as well as the alternative art space Sala Artspace (2006-2007). After participating in documenta (Kassel, 2012), he held a solo show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013), and has since featured in numerous exhibitions and biennials around the world, including the Venice Biennale (2017).

Following his return to Cambodia, the artist started to work with local materials like bamboo, rattan, burlap, beeswax, and earth pigments, mainly producing sculptures inspired by bodily organs, vegetal forms, and geometric structures. The rattan or bamboo are drawn largely from indigenous sources and made using traditional weaving techniques. While his works are informed by personal experience during the genocide of the late 1970s, when the country was governed by the Khmer Rouge, Pich himself says: “My sculptures resist easy categorizations and expectations. For me, they are more about the slow labor of making something from nothing, a connection to natural materials.”(*) The works evoke glimpses of time, memory, and religion, and are grounded in the body as a basic denominator. They also can be read as abstract compositions that have an affinity with Postminimalism in the West. The subtlety and visual power of the biomorphic structures such as Large Seed suggest scaffolding for as-yet unbuilt and potential forms in a technical refinement combined with a visceral, emotive force.

* The artist's website, https://sopheap-pich.com/about/ (accessed February 15, 2023).