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The Threaded Path, Season 1 Episode 3: Phloeun Prim
"Rooted, Not Frozen" is the third episode of The Threaded Path, in which the host Amara Goel talks with the arts leader Phloeun Prim. Prim is the executive director of Living Arts International and a former director of Cambodian Living Arts. The episode was released on YouTube on October 2, 2026, as part of the first season, Phnom Penh: City of Rooted & Returning Voices.[1][2] The episode describes itself as a conversation about roots, responsibility, cultural confidence and the courage to evolve.[1]
About the episode
Prim tells how he was born in 1976 in the countryside of Siem Reap, left Cambodia at the age of three, and grew up in Montreal, where he studied business and international management. He came back to Cambodia in 1998. His first real job was at Artisans d'Angkor, a school that trained young rural Cambodians in stone carving, wood carving, lacquerware and silk, where he worked in marketing and sales until 2008. He then moved to Cambodian Living Arts, which he calls a natural bridge from craft to the living arts. He spoke Khmer when he returned but could not write it, and he describes how he learned.[1]
He and Goel discuss what he sees as three chapters of Cambodian arts since the late 1990s. The first was rescue: finding the old masters, giving them dignity and passing on what they knew by heart. From about 2010 came room for creativity and new expression, so that the culture would not freeze, and in the last decade young Cambodians have felt free to express who they are today. As an example he tells how Arn Chorn-Pond found the chapei master Kong Nay living in a poor community behind the White Building in Phnom Penh, and how Kong Nay later appeared in VannDa's song Time To Rise. Prim argues for letting go of the stigma of victimhood and letting traditions live and move.[1]
Later he talks about what would make the arts sustainable: artists able to make a living from their art like any other profession, with social protections, arts in education, and cultural and creative industries linked to tourism. He describes his current project, "An AI of Our Own", about the oral traditions of communities of the Global South and who owns and governs the data made from them. He hopes Cambodian art will be seen for its quality and creativity, and he names his joys: life, movement, family, friends, community and his cats. Art, he says, is a window to the world.[1]
Watch and listen
Also in this series
- Chef Nak: Food is Just a Hook (Episode 1, September 12, 2026)
- Fonki: The Ancestral Echoes of Painting on Walls (Episode 2, September 12, 2026)
- Rooted, Not Frozen (Episode 3, October 2, 2026)