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Hidden Identities in Contemporary Cambodian Photography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2021

Suzie Kim
Suzie Kim*
Affiliation:
Department of Art and Art History, University of Mary Washington, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: skim8@umw.edu
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Abstract

This article examines the works of three photographers, Kim Hak (b. 1981), Khvay Samnang (b. 1982), and Neak Sophal (b. 1989), all born in the post-Khmer Rouge era and all established relatively early in their careers. These third-generation Cambodian photographers construct portraitures that steer away from identity to address the larger issues of individuals and local communities in present-day Cambodia, which still lives in the shadow of the trauma of the Khmer Rouge. Kim's photography avoids a direct representation of people who suffered through the Khmer Rouge regime and instead presents small, ordinary objects that were kept secretly in their household; Khvay documents the hardship of local communities in Phnom Penh and their questioned identity by portraying masked faces; Neak questions the hardship of the youth, women, and townspeople through the erasure of face in her series of photographs depicting various community groups in Cambodia. This subtle avoidance of portraying individuals in a direct, straightforward way signifies a multi-faceted interpretation of the traumatic past, its resilience, and the newly added social problems of contemporary Cambodia, which struggles in the aftermath of the genocide and more recent economic growth.

Keywords

Cambodian photographycontemporary Cambodian artnational traumaphotographypost-Khmer Rouge
Type
Original Article
Information
TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , May 2022 , pp. 59 - 74
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Institute for East Asian Studies, Sogang University

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