SIEM REAP, Cambodia — Svay Sareth didn’t remember Cambodia, his own country. Growing up in Site 2, a refugee camp on the border of Thailand, he drew pictures of his homeland based on images he had seen in books. Yim Maline, who remained at home with her family during the Khmer Rouge period, made toys for herself out of cans and river reeds as a child, yearning for something more. “I want to be an artist,” Yim declared to Svay when they met later back in Cambodia. She followed this with a hesitant question: “What is an artist?”
The couple went on to answer that question for themselves. Yim and Svay achieved international recognition making art that remixed Cambodia for the next generation, first at the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Caen, later at residencies in New York City. Yim’s constructions of handmade paper and repurposed trash document the environmental devastation first of the civil war and genocide in the late 1970s and then of a surge in international investment, while Svay’s performance works and expansive sculptural pieces map out wartime trauma and its aftereffects.
After nearly a decade living abroad, Yim and Svay returned home. We visited their latest project, the Blue Art Center in Siem Reap, while in Cambodia in 2022 to meet activists demanding the repatriation of stolen heritage. The center previously consisted of their own studios, an art school for children and teens, an apartment for visiting international artists, and an extensive design and fabrication center that produces various large-scale sculptural and architectural commissions. This spring, they plan to expand the complex by adding a new museum for contemporary art and a gallery shop. We spoke to Svay over Zoom about the expansion and how it will connect with the rest of the center’s work.
The art center’s compound is not far from the vast Angkor Archaeological Park, home to hundreds of years of successive imperial capitals. Despite their proximity, Svay wants his museum to move beyond that familiar history. “Now we do our first step, moving into the future,” he said. Many Cambodians, he explains, think of museums as only like those they have seen at home, where most art institutions revolve around rooms full of ancient Khmer carvings. Svay wants the center’s museum to inspire new directions and freedoms, describing the current moment as “a period of bricolage for Khmer art of the future.”
Still, Svay recognizes the weight of history; he once literally dragged a giant metal sphere behind him, on foot, from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh in a performance piece titled “Mon Boulet” (2011) to explore the idea of the burdens people carry. The sphere was inscribed with a record of its journey, having been battered on the road and, at Svay’s invitation, written on by bemused passersby. Some had scribbled their hopes on it; others their fears. One person worried that Svay was using it to smuggle drugs. When the Singapore Museum of Art asked for the sphere for its collection, the piece turned out to be too large. According to Svay, the institution had to get permission from UNESCO to cut an opening in the wall of their historic building so they could roll the sphere into one of the galleries.
The center has come together gradually, an extension of Yim and Svay’s own home, lives, and artistic practices. The two met at Phare Ponleu Selpak, another art school that Svay helped found in his early 20s, after a brief and irritating stint managing a banana plantation. Besides telling Svay that she wanted to be an artist, Yim declared she wanted to one day have a house, two children, and a garden.
Gardening had always been important to Yim. As a child, she’d nurtured the growth of a little plot of vegetables while hearing, in the distance, explosions from the civil war’s front. Unsurprisingly, given this background, intertwined images of growth and destruction still are central to her work: battered landscapes, for example, constructed out of burnt cardboard, or broken shards of pottery embedded in plots of rich topsoil.
When she told Svay her dream of a house and garden, he drew a design for her and said they would build it together. He hung it on the wall as a promise. Years later, after their stint in France, the couple took that drawing out of its frame, planted that garden, and built that house. The garden has now become the heart of their center, which has grown organically around it. The home they built now holds classrooms for their weekend art school, whose young students come to experiment with art materials and techniques.
Yim and Svay told us that they want their students to experience a radical openness of approach. Their ambition is to transform the way young Cambodians understand the role of art in their lives. “The children use all these tools to create what we call ‘art’ but it’s really about freedom,” Svay said. They are taught not only by the artists, designers, and fabricators at work elsewhere on the campus, but also by visiting practitioners participating in the center’s international residency program, which has welcomed artists from Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, and the United States. It is Svay’s hope that this contact will inspire children who have no professional interest in the arts to think more creatively, to feel expressive freedom of a kind that can be rare in Cambodia.
The looseness of the school’s exploratory curriculum reflects the rich variety of the couple’s own artistic practices. Svay’s work ranges between performance and construction, often demanding he master new skills. In a meditation on exile while he was studying in France, for example, Svay built a boat from scratch without following plans or diagrams. He wanted to force himself to learn something new. He then dragged his boat the 10 miles (~16 kilometers) from his studio to the sea, where he found, somewhat to his surprise and perhaps chagrin, that it actually floated. Yim’s work is similarly varied in medium and approach. She builds abstract sculptural ecosystems of puckered paper and burnt cardboard; constructs installations out of sod and soil; and has produced a series of surreal graphite drawings of girls in dreamscapes suggesting confinement, transformation, and defiance.
Besides the school, the museum, the residency apartment, and the shop, the Blue Art Center houses design offices and fabrication spaces staffed by about 50 local artists, artisans, and designers who fulfill the various commissions that cover the costs for the whole endeavor. These commissions have ranged from designing and executing long bas-reliefs to massive stupas and multi-building compounds. Always working to expand his team’s technical capabilities, Svay recently hired specialists who have worked at Versailles to teach local artisans how to apply gold leaf. “We have all the skills, from conceptual art to Versailles art to chopsticks,” Svay commented wryly.
The museum will open by showing the couple’s own art, including Ruins (2014–ongoing), Svay’s series of enigmatic plush figures in the style of Angkor statuary that are stitched together out of military camouflage. The work is replete with possible meanings. To foreigners with a cursory understanding of Cambodia’s recent history, the camouflage may seem like a common trope. To Svay, it suggests the way Cambodians protect themselves from notice. These ancient, defaced deities seem to have worn the camouflage for so long that it has become a second skin, as if they are constructed of concealment. At the same time, the gods and asuras are stuffed with kapok, which is both a typical local crop and a pun: In Khmer, the word also means “mute.”
Though the museum space will start small, Svay has ambitions. “My museum is like a grain of sand — because a grain of sand has the DNA of the universe,” he explained.
Already, Svay has begun using the museum space to show work by friends and colleagues, including those from the Sa Sa Art Projects collective in Phnom Penh. All are working in parallel to transform the art scene in Cambodia to no longer center on repeating the style of ruins a thousand years old, but to forge novel aesthetics and shape others’ dreams just as powerfully. Yim has said, of her own art, “Completion is not the objective; I am more interested in the physical process” — and this seems to be the couple’s credo when it comes to the expansion of the Blue Art Center, too. They have faith that it will continue to transform itself — and encourage new voices in the future of Cambodian art.