Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles

The Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles (IKTT) is a nongovernmental organization in Siem Reap that revives Khmer silk weaving and natural dyeing. The Japanese textile artist Kikuo Morimoto founded it in 1996, after war and upheaval had left the craft close to disappearing. Its initials echo ikat, the technique of tying and dyeing patterns into threads before weaving. The institute also uses the name Innovation of Khmer Traditional Textiles. Its village workshop, Wisdom from the Forest, lies about 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of the city.

Illustration inspired by a silk-weaving village near Phnom Penh.

Organization details
Alternative names	IKTT; Innovation of Khmer Traditional Textiles
Type	Arts and culture
Focus areas	Khmer silk weaving, natural dyeing and sericulture
Subjects	Crafts & Material Culture
City	Siem Reap
Country	Cambodia
Address	Shop and museum: #476, Group 12, Viheachen Village, Svaydongkum Commune, Siem Reap; village and workshop: Chob Saom Village, Peak Snaeng, Angkor Thom District, Siem Reap
Founded	1996
Website	Website
Operating status	active

History

Kikuo Morimoto was born in Kyoto in 1948 and trained for five years as a painter of kimono in the hand-drawn yuzen style. On a first visit to Thailand in 1980 he saw Cambodian ikat at a museum in Bangkok. From 1983 he volunteered in refugee camps in Thailand, where he taught hand weaving and natural dyeing until 1995.

UNESCO commissioned him to survey traditional silk weaving in Cambodia in 1995 or 1994. He visited more than 36 villages in eight provinces. Morimoto wrote that hand weaving had been slowly returning since 1990, but that almost all of the silk was imported from Vietnam, few weavers under the age of 50 had mastered weaving and dyeing, and middlemen who supplied the yarn paid the weavers little. Many of the skilled weavers he found were women in their 70s and 80s in remote villages. In 1995 he began reviving the raising of silkworms with a native breed in a village of Kampot province, one of the few places where the practice had survived.

Morimoto founded IKTT in January 1996 as a nonprofit, nonpolitical Cambodian organization, in Takhmao on the outskirts of Phnom Penh or in Phnom Penh. One account places the founding in Siem Reap, and another has Morimoto setting up a silk production studio there in 1996. A third gives 2002 as the year the institute opened outside Siem Reap. The work began with seven older weavers, who became known as the "silk grandmothers". Morimoto found them across the country, in Kampot, Takeo and the north, and relied on them to pass their skills to younger weavers. In 1999 he set up the Mulberry Tree Fund, which started silkworm projects in Battambang and other provinces badly affected by landmines.

IKTT moved to Siem Reap in 2000 and began taking trainees there. In 2002 Morimoto proposed a "Project to Regenerate a Traditional Forest": a forest where lac insects, the source of a red dye, could live again, with a garden of dye plants, fields of cotton and mulberry, and a small hamlet for weaving, dyeing, bamboo work, woodwork and pottery. IKTT dates its purchase of about five hectares (12 acres) of land in Angkor Thom district to 2002, and work on the site began in 2003. In his own account, Morimoto got farmland near Siem Reap during research that began in 1995 and went on for about two to three more years. He remembered the land as like a wasteland at first. Work began by clearing it, and he planted trees, put up a house, sank a well and laid out a road and a farm. In 2003 IKTT and the Center for Khmer Studies held an exhibition and seminar on hol that brought together Khmer and Cham weaving.

Morimoto received a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2004 for the project, and used the award money to set up silk workshops where older artisans taught dyeing and weaving to younger ones. In 2007 he had an audience with King Norodom Sihamoni, who praised the institute for giving work to poor Cambodian women and keeping the tradition alive. The Smithsonian invited him to explain Khmer silk dyeing and weaving, and as of July 2010 the institute's textiles were available at the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington, D.C. His books include Bayon Moon: Reviving Cambodia's Textile Traditions (2008), in English, and a booklet in Khmer, The Wisdom from the Forest (2011).

Morimoto died on July 3, 2017, during a stay in Japan for medical treatment. Before his death he had recorded on paper the ikat patterns he collected in the provinces, above all in Takeo, and IKTT's weavers work from those records. As of 2022, the institute's director was Yarn Marina, who had worked there for nearly 20 years. The IKTT Museum opened on March 1, 2026, with old Khmer textiles and weaving tools that Morimoto had collected since 1996.

Wisdom from the Forest

The village stands at Chob Saom (also spelled Chot Sam and Chub Soam), in Angkor Thom district. Its land grew from the first five hectares to about 23 hectares (57 acres) of forest and gardens. About half of the site is kept as an area for the forest to grow back, and the government recognized the settlement as a "new village". Mulberry trees feed IKTT's golden silkworms, and dye plants grow there, among them annatto (Bixa orellana), whose spiny fruit holds orange seeds, and indigo, a plant that nearly vanished from Cambodia during the civil war. Lac insects, the source of the red that marks Cambodian ikat, breed only in narrow conditions, and as of 2011 Morimoto was recreating those conditions at the village. Cows supply fertilizer, and the villagers grow cotton, vegetables and fruit trees.

In 2011 about 500 people lived and worked at the village, divided into 24 groups with their own specialties, a system Morimoto modeled on the division of labor in Kyoto kimono making. One group built looms and traditional wooden houses, and another made the banana ash used in dyeing. The weavers came from Takeo and Kampot and included Khmer, Cham, Chinese and Vietnamese people; Morimoto brought Khmer and Cham weavers into one workshop, and by 2011 at least 20 Cham women were training there. Profits from the textiles paid the workers' salaries and living costs, and trainees were paid while they learned. Other counts differ by year and by what they include: more than 400 workers in Siem Reap in 2007, 150 residents in 50 homes, with a school of 50 children, in 2016, and about 150 residents on the institute's own page. An undated account gives a staff of about 800, and more than 400 weavers have trained at the institute.

Weaving and dyeing

IKTT weaves hol, the Khmer weft ikat. Sections of the weft yarn are tied with strips of banana leaf and dipped in successive dye baths, and the patterns appear in the threads before they reach the loom. The institute makes only traditional patterns, from Morimoto's records, and its weavers work on wooden looms with bamboo reeds, which break if the weaving is rushed. It is one of a few nonprofit groups that train weavers in pidan, the pictorial silk hangings once given to Wats, and sell the cloths to visitors. Its products include sarongs, krama scarves and furniture.

Every dye is natural. The raw silk is first cleaned white with banana peel, leaves and bark. Red comes from a bark called leak, yellow from the shell of the prahoot fruit (Garcinia vilersiana), and green from a liquid called smin; lychee bark and coconut shell give other shades. Weather shapes the work: a batch of dyeing takes one to two weeks in clear weather and three to four weeks when rain threatens. Morimoto summed up his approach in his book Bayon Moon: "Tradition is something that needs to be created, not simply protected."

Visiting

The shop and museum are in Siem Reap, and the workshops are at the village. At the village, visitors can tour the workshops, take part in natural dyeing, walk in the forest and see silkworms being raised.

References