“We are at an Exciting Moment”: Reaksmey Yean on Cambodian Visual Arts Amanda Rogers
A native of Battambang, Reaksmey Yean is an art advocate, art curator, writer and researcher. He has been an Alphawood Scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, an exchange scholar at the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs, Chiang Mai University, and in 2017 he became the first recipient of the SEAsia Scholars Award at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, where he was also funded by an Asian Cultural Council fellowship. Reaksmey has been a curator for creative programmes at Java Creative Café, Phnom Penh, and has served in several senior posts, including an Assistant to the School of Performing Arts at Phare Ponleu Selpak, a multi-disciplinary arts centre in Battambang where he received his early education. He is interested in multi-disciplinary contemporary art practice and recently opened the Silapak Trotchaek Pneik art gallery in Phnom Penh. As an art advocate, he promotes art and culture in contemporary Cambodia via curatorial practices and art criticism. As a scholar, he is concerned with Buddhist art, contemporary and modern arts, Southeast Asia, and decolonial theory. Reaskmey is currently finishing a position at the Centre for Khmer Studies as a co-investigator on the project ‘Contemporary Arts Making and Creative Expression among Young Cambodians.’ I am leading this project in collaboration with Cambodian Living Arts, and it is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom, and the Global Challenges Research Fund via the post-conflict research programme ‘Changing the Story’. Reaksmey and I first met when we were both invited to speak as part of a panel on ‘Heritage Arts and the Contemporary’ at the Southeast Asian Arts Festival in London in 2014. This was to open the exhibition of ‘Fractured/Khmer Passages’ by Thomas Buttery and Jai Rafferty, produced by Annie Jael Kwan. Reaksmey’s interests lie predominantly in the visual arts, whereas mine lie in
From The Periphery
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