Creator

Leang Seckon

Painter and collage artist from Prey Veng province, shown in London by Rossi & Rossi.

A studio worktable in Cambodia covered with overlapping pasted cut-outs of patterned papers, flowers and temple-roof shapes, with paint pots, brushes and scissors, and a half-finished collage panel on an easel behind
Illustration of studio worktable layered with paper collage and paint. It shows no real studio and none of the artist's work.

Leang Seckon is a Cambodian painter and collage artist whose work draws on his childhood under the Khmer Rouge.[1][2] He is known for crowded, tapestry-like scenes that combine painting with pasted pictures of film stars, vehicles, royalty and religious art.[2][1] His London gallery is Rossi & Rossi.[2][3]

Early life

Asia House gives his birth as 1970, in the village of Maelop in Prey Veng province; Rossi & Rossi says the early 1970s.[1][3] He grew up during the American bombing of the early 1970s and was five when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.[1][2] In those years he lived in the village with his mother, gathered cattle and buffalo dung for the rice fields and hardly went to school, while his father and older brother worked away. He has said that soldiers once tried to carry him off in a truck and that he fought free and ran home.[1]

He was drawn early to the carvings and murals of pagodas. At about nine or ten he ground leaves and fruit into colors and painted them onto bamboo.[1] In the 1980s he herded buffalo in the countryside, and he has said that being too poor for school made him cry.[2]

Training

He entered the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh in the early 1990s and studied art and design there. In 1997 the American artist Chris Lawson saw his paintings and sought him out, and Seckon says it was Lawson who first told him that what he made was art.[1] Rossi & Rossi dates his graduation to 2002.[3]

Work

Many of his pictures return to the Khmer Rouge years. The Elephant and the Pond of Blood shows an elephant wading through a field of blood up to its belly. The title comes from a Khmer saying, and the upper part is painted on cloth from the skirts village women wore and mended during the civil war.[2][1] Other works take on King Norodom Sihanouk, the pollution of the Mekong and the 1960s world of Cambodian songs and films.[2][1] He has painted on fabric such as the krama scarf. His materials include acrylic, cotton and prayer leaflets.[2][1]

In 2008 he laid a naga about 225 meters (740 feet) long, made from recycled plastic, along the Siem Reap River, a public work against the waste in the water.[1] Rossi & Rossi lists a Rubbish Project in Phnom Penh the same year.[3]

Exhibitions

  • 2009: the 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan and the New Zero Contemporary Art Exchange in Yangon.[3]
  • 2010: first solo show with Rossi & Rossi in London.[2]
  • 2012: Shanghai Biennale.[3]
  • 2013: the Season of Cambodia festival in New York.[2]
  • 2014: Hell on Earth, a solo show of 14 large works and five small collages at Asia House, London, organized by Rossi & Rossi.[2][1]
  • 2015: the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.[3]
  • 2026: announced for Phnom Penh Contemporary, at the Royal University of Fine Arts.[4]

References 4
  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Asia House, Painful memories from Khmer Rouge regime transformed into profound art (August 7, 2014)
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 The Cambodia Daily, Artist Leang Seckon Reflects on Cambodia's Journey (June 23, 2014)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Rossi & Rossi, Leang Seckon (undated)
  4. ↑ Le Petit Journal Cambodge, Phnom Penh Contemporary investira l'École des beaux-arts en novembre (in French, October 11, 2026)
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This page was last edited on 27 October 2026, at 14:55.