Ricefield Mirages
by Chea Sereyroth

Exhibition opening: Friday, 20 September 2019, 6:00-8:00 pm
Exhibition period: 20 Sep - 27 November 2019

The role of rice is fundamental to Cambodian culture. From time immemorial, seasonal demands of its cultivation have dominated people’s lives, yet nurtured souls. Even today ,rice paddies still make up the vast majority of agricultural land. Faced with what appears to be timeless reality, Chea Sereyroth attempts to reconcile contemporary perspectives to Cambodia’s rural environment.

His works confront attitudes (and sometimes denigration of) his country’s poor agricultural labourers. In the sense of dichotomy, this marginalised populace is both indispensable yet ignored, loved but scorned. These rice toilers concentrate a number of contradictions. The fields are places of conflict, power, interdependence, and contrary desires. Initial impressions can be quite misleading. With the perspective of a child brought up in the country tilling rice before having to leave for studying and working in the city, the artist presents eight artworks in this exhibition. In the process, he confronts questions related to rural Cambodian life. Conflicted by the vision of a full, yet abandoned, meal, wasted, and untapped raw materials juxtaposed with intense scenes of joy amidst rural poverty, Sereyroth questions his time through powerful images connecting earth and the world of rice fields. Whether his medium is dirt, mud, or sawdust, the artist evokes the theme of rice fields and rural life throughout.

Sereyroth’s works are luminous, powerful, fine, traced on a mat fading without disappearing, taking to Cambodia’s rural change taking place today. Woven mats (substituting for canvas)are an equally precious, uniquely rural medium. This base is emotionally charged and intimately connected to subsistence farm life. Indeed, these are used variously for sleeping, eating, travelling, and even used for camping or as a blanket rolled out amongst the fields. Exceptionally made here with pandanus leaves for its unique durability, these mats bring us back to the intangibility of the rice fields that our world may carelessly forget.