Svay Sareth

Svay Sareth is a Cambodian sculptor and performance artist from Battambang who works with camouflage, metal and other materials tied to war.

Illustration of an open sculptor's workshop yard in Cambodia. It shows no real workshop and none of the artist's work.

Creator details
Roles	Visual artist
Active	1980s to present
Based in	Cambodia
Recognition	Prudential Eye Awards, Overall Best Emerging Artist (2016)

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Svay Sareth connects to 8 pages

Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, Khmer Rouge, Churning of the Sea of Milk and 3 more.

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On this page

1. Early life
2. Phare Ponleu Selpak and France
3. Work
4. Prudential Eye Awards
5. Teaching
6. References

On this page

1. Early life
2. Phare Ponleu Selpak and France
3. Work
4. Prudential Eye Awards
5. Teaching
6. References

Svay Sareth is a Cambodian artist who works in sculpture, installation and long, physically demanding performance. He was born in Battambang in 1972, spent much of his youth in a refugee camp on the Thai border and co-founded the art school Phare Ponleu Selpak. In 2016 he won the top emerging-artist prize, "Overall Best Emerging Artist", at the Prudential Eye Awards for Contemporary Asian Art in Singapore.

Early life

Svay Sareth spent his early childhood under the Khmer Rouge. Focus Cambodia says he was six when his family fled, shortly before the regime was driven out in 1979. He spent 13 years of his childhood in Site Two, a camp on the Thai-Cambodian border that sheltered more than 300,000 people. He began making art there as a young teenager, and drawing and painting became a daily habit, a way of bearing witness to the violence around him and of imagining escape. He has called life as a refugee "a void nationality…a time and place you imagine escaping from."

Phare Ponleu Selpak and France

After the wars ended he co-founded Phare Ponleu Selpak, a nonprofit art school in Battambang; the Cambodia Daily places this in the early 1990s. In 2002 he led a trip of Phare students from Battambang to Siem Reap, drawing and painting portraits of people along the way, and the group stayed three months in a village near Ta Prohm. That year he went on to study in France and earned a French master's degree in fine arts in 2009. He then settled in Siem Reap.

Work

Svay Sareth works with materials and actions tied to war: metal, uniforms, camouflage and feats of endurance. His work draws on his own life through war and resistance, and Richard Koh Fine Art writes that it avoids dwelling on violence; it turns instead to survival, adventure, power and futility. In the performance Mon Boulet he dragged an 80-kilogram metal ball from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. In the video I, Svay Sareth, am eating rubber sandals he chews the kind of black rubber sandal worn in the Khmer Rouge years.

For the Season of Cambodia festival in New York in 2013 he made Churning, a mural along a 17-meter walkway at Brookfield Place. It showed the Phnom Penh square of the Vietnamese-Cambodian Friendship Monument with the monument replaced by a camouflage version of the Churning of the Sea of Milk, the creation story carved at Angkor Wat. He was also one of five artists in residence on Governors Island during the festival.

Wings of Throne, shown at Richard Koh Fine Art in Singapore in 2022, is a set of soft sculptures of cotton, kapok and nylon in the shape of camouflage dragon's wings, a satire on power in Cambodia's recent history. In his studio stands a camouflage figure of his mother, who bore 13 children; he says the camouflage stands for the silence that the army imposed.

Prudential Eye Awards

In January 2016 a jury that included Fumio Nanjo of Tokyo's Mori Art Museum gave him the top emerging-artist prize at the Prudential Eye Awards for Contemporary Asian Art, and he also won its prize for sculpture. The prize brought $50,000 and a solo show at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Teaching

He has worked as artistic director of Artisans Angkor, a company run as a social business to keep traditional Khmer crafts alive. In Siem Reap he set up the Blue Arts Centre, an art and design school he describes as belonging to the new generation of Cambodians. His wife, the artist Yim Maline, studied at Phare.

References 5