Creator
Vann Nath
Painter who survived the S-21 prison and painted what he saw there.
Vann Nath (1946 to 2011) was a Cambodian painter and one of the few prisoners who came out of S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison in Phnom Penh, alive. His paintings of prison life hang in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, and his 1998 memoir was, at his death, the one account of the prison written by someone who survived it.[1][2]
Early life
He was born in Wat Sopee, in Battambang province, and grew up there. As a boy he watched painters decorate the walls of Wats. In 1965 he began two years of painting studies at a regional school, where he learned in the style of the French Impressionists, and then worked as a painter of commissioned portraits and cinema billboards.[1][3]
S-21
After the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, he and his family were sent to work on a farming commune in Battambang's Sangke district. On December 29, 1977, Khmer Rouge cadres took him from the commune to S-21.[1] The guards kept him alive because he could paint, and put him to work on painted and sculpted likenesses of Pol Pot and the regime's other leaders.[2][3] He was freed on January 7, 1979, when Vietnamese forces took Phnom Penh.[1]
Paintings of the prison
Later in 1979 he went back to the prison for the new government and painted scenes of prison life, which are shown in what became the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.[1] These paintings show prisoners being tortured, and they are counted among the most important visual records of Cambodia's modern history.[2] Youk Chhang of the Documentation Center of Cambodia said his paintings helped Cambodians rebuild an exact memory of the period so that they could face it.[3]
In the late 1990s he turned to gentle landscapes of the countryside he remembered from his childhood. The Village of My Birth (1998) shows him as a young man playing the flute under a tree in bloom, and it was shown at Reyum Gallery in the exhibition "Legacy of Absence: A Cambodian Story" in 2000.[1]
His memoir, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21 Prison, came out in 1998.[3][2]
Witness at the tribunal
In June 2009 he was the first S-21 survivor to give evidence before the Khmer Rouge tribunal, in the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, the head of S-21.[2] At the trial he said he had resolved that, if he survived, he would set down what happened so that younger Cambodians would know of their suffering.[1]
Death and remembrance
After years of ill health, including kidney disease, he went into a coma after a cardiac arrest on August 26, 2011, and died at a private hospital in Phnom Penh on September 5, 2011, at 66.[2][1] The tribunal's spokesman praised his testimony and his lifelong work at the Tuol Sleng museum.[2]
In September 2021, ten years later, the Bophana Center and his family put 11 of his black-and-white drawings online, each with a description.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 The Editors, "Vann Nath (1946-2011)", ArtAsiaPacific (September 22, 2011)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 "Cambodia's 'Killing Fields' painter dies", Al Jazeera (September 5, 2011)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Cambodian Painter Used Art to Show Khmer Rouge Brutality", VOA (September 5, 2011)
- ↑ Bophana Center, 10th Anniversary of painter VANN Nath's memories (September 5, 2021)