SOPHEAP PICH

Vice versa in the ethereal solids



Buddha 2 by Sopheap Pich, 2009, Rattan, wire, dye
Dimensions: H. 100 in. (254 cm); W. 29 in. (73.7 cm); D. 9 in. (22.9 cm)
Purchase, Friends of Asian Art Gifts, 2012. Accession Number: 2012.349
© Sopheap Pich




The sculptor is an artist of dimensions. Not only of the space dimensions, although that’s the most obvious view, but also the temporal one. The contemporary Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich is a very good example of it as we can see in his latest exhibition Cambodian rattan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1971, he creates new forms from the ancient culture of his country. His work Morning Glory is a remarkable proof of how traditions and history can be a way to explore our own point of view of existence and becoming finally the starting point of something new. His explanation of that particular work gives us a clear image of his creative process: “During Pol Pot’s [regime in the] 1970s, the most important source of nourishment for the population, other than rice, was morning glory. Because it is the easiest plant to grow, it became the vegetable of almost every meal. Cambodians ate so much morning glory it is surprising that we still eat it today. I think it must be one of the lowest in the culinary food chain; the flower of the morning glory has almost no nutritional value at all. It also dies very quickly after being picked. It has a beautiful shape though—having the shape of the iconic RCA phonograph. My idea was simple: to make a gigantic portrait of the morning glory plant with flowers as the best way possible to commemorate its importance to me. To make it at this scale was a risk: we spent almost six months making a work that we didn’t know what the end result would be, nor if it would have any value as an art object.” 1 From the pain suffered by the Cambodians during the Pol Pot’s dictatorship he focuses on the beauty of the morning glory’s shape and creates something new thanks to his work with rattan: an everlasting morning glory flower made of rattan, bamboo, wire, plywood and steel bolts. Looking at it, the flower seems to be alive, one can feel a kind of movement as well as the time and the space dance across the universe. It’s fluid and rigid, ephemeral and eternal, at the same time, at the same space.

The fields of Ratanakiri works came from his trips across one of the most biologically diverse lands in Cambodia. “So my assistants and I set out to make different sizes of grid structures without knowing what else to do with them. In the meantime, I had been collecting different color dirt and pebbles from different parts of Cambodia during my travels. I don’t know how important it was but for me I always thought that nature is so much more interesting than politics and culture. I wanted to fill my mind with what my eyes see and what possibility would come of it. I had also been collecting different beeswax through the years... It was only a matter of time before some of these materials found their way into the works.”2 The result is two works deeply intense that transmit the feeling of a hard land in which survival is a concept so far away from our western worries, a fight against and along with nature here presented in bamboo, rattan, wire, burlap, beeswax, damar, earth pigment, charcoal, plastics and oil paint, a portrait of the inner structure of life and the work of Sopheap Pich itself in which abstract is just a point of view of reality.
SOPHEAD PICH | CAMBODIAN RATTAN. Exhibition here
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Budha 2 sculpture by Sophead Pich. © Sopheap Pich
Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York
Reference 1 and 2 are descriptions made by Sophead Pich
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York
All rigths reserved