Cambodian artist Svay Sareth on the responsibility of art, eat rubber sandals, and walking 250km with a 80kg metal ball.
“I, Svay Sareth, eat rubber sandals.”, 2015
Ep.86 | I sat down with Cambodian-based artist Svay Sareth. We began our conversation talking about how the Blue Art Center provides free art education to children to become independent and find their own way, the impact of imagination, Sareth spoke passionately about his mission to preserve Cambodian’s artisanship and history for the next generation, and his performance work eat rubber sandals. We talked about Sareth’s experience of walking for 250 kilometres with a metal ball from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh and the amazing story how this work did not fit in the Singapora Art Museum, an UNESCO protected building.
Svay Sareth’s works in sculpture, installation and durational performance are made using materials and processes intentionally associated with war – metals, uniforms, camouflage and actions requiring great endurance. While his critical and cathartic practice is rooted in an autobiography of war and resistance, he refuses both historical particularity and voyeurism on violence. Rather, his works traverse both present and historical moments, drawing on processes of survival and adventure, and ideas of power and futility. More recently, Svay confronts the idea that “the present is also a dangerous time” through the appropriation and dramatization of public monuments that hint at contentious political histories.
Svay Sareth was born in 1972 in Battambang, Cambodia during a period of political turmoil and violence that would last until he was 18 years old. Svay began making art as a young teenager in the Site 2 refugee camp, near the Thai-Cambodian border. He describes life as a refugee as “a void nationality…a time and place you imagine escaping from.” Drawing and painting became a daily activity for Svay – a process of bearing witness to the psychological and physical violence that was an everyday experience, as well as a way to symbolically escape and dream of change. After the wars ended, 1994 Svay went on to co-found Phare Ponlue Selepak, a non-governmental organization and art school in Battambang that continues to thrive today.In 2002, the artist continued his studies in France, earning the Diplôme National Supérieur d'Études des Arts Plastiques / MFA in 2009, after which he returned to Siem Reap to live and work and 2019 he found Blue Art Center.
Svay Sareth, Mon Boulet, 2011, Durational performance, 5 days, Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Svay Sareth, Toy (Churning of the Sea of Milk), 2013
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