Linda Sok

Linda Sok is a Cambodian-Australian artist whose sculpture and weaving deal with the Khmer Rouge regime and the near loss of pidan silk weaving.

A pidan showing the Great Departure of Prince Siddhartha, Cambodia, 1880 to 1910, in the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Creator details
Roles	Visual artist
Based in	Australia; Cambodia
Subjects	History & Remembrance; Migration & Diaspora

Linda Sok is a Cambodian-Australian artist who makes sculptural installations and woven works about her Khmer heritage. Much of her work responds to the Khmer Rouge regime, and since 2023 she has made a series of weavings that re-imagine lost pidan, a Khmer silk weaving tradition.

Education

Sok grew up in Australia. She studied fine art at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. She graduated from its art and design school in 2018 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first-class honors and the University Medal in Fine Arts. She told the magazine Liminal that until about her second year there she made work on many different subjects, and that seeing other artists explore their own identities led her to focus on Cambodian culture. She later earned a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States.

Work on the Khmer Rouge years

Her 2019 exhibition Soft Monument, at a student-run gallery at UNSW, approached the Khmer Rouge regime without showing violence. UNSW described the installation, made with mosquito nets and gold leaf, as a gentler way to speak about the regime and its lasting effects.

In Corporeal/Spiritual, shown at the Sydney gallery Firstdraft in 2020, she transformed joss paper. In the Liminal interview, her fellow Cambodian-Australian Allison Chhorn described the pieces as skin-like. Firstdraft wrote that her practice tries to move the way Cambodia is remembered away from genocide and toward healing.

Pidan and Deities in Temples

Sok has made the series Deities in Temples since 2023. Pidan is a silk weaving tradition in many colors. In the Murray Art Museum Albury interview, Sok explained that pidan weavers tie off parts of the threads before dyeing them, the resist method known as ikat, so that the tied areas form the image. The museum wrote that the tradition nearly disappeared because the Khmer Rouge persecuted weavers, which left little of the knowledge behind.

The series is based on registration cards in the archives of the National Museum of Cambodia. The museum wrote that, for some old weavings, the cards are the only record that they existed. Sok's works re-imagine those lost or destroyed pieces from the cards' written descriptions and from drawings and sketches. She said that she does not try to recreate the lost pidan, because she sees silk weaving as a sacred art form that she does not want simply to copy.

Works from the series were shown at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2025 in the exhibition Reincarnations of an altar cloth. The exhibition then went to the Murray Art Museum Albury, in New South Wales, from March 19 to June 21, 2026.

Exhibitions and prizes

Sok was a finalist for the New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship in 2019 and has been a studio resident at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. In 2024 she won the Monash Room Emerging Artist Prize, given through the Australian Consulate in New York, and the Dorner Prize of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work has been shown in Australia, the United States, Denmark and Cambodia, including at Maloop in Phnom Penh.

References