Buddha (from '1979' series) 2009

Sopheap Pich’s sculptures reflect on Cambodian life, landscape and history, often through the prism of his personal experience as a child under the Khmer Rouge communist regime of the 1970s. The artist meticulously crafts his works from rattan and bamboo, combining traditional weaving techniques with the visual language of contemporary sculpture. Hovering between figuration and abstraction, his works offer lyrical representations of forms and phenomena observed in the natural environment and in daily Cambodian life.

This delicate, ghostlike figure, the tips of its willowy curls of rattan stained red, recalls the temple grounds Pich’s family temporarily called home while awaiting evacuation to a refugee camp in Thailand. It is difficult to discern if Pich’s Buddha is coming into existence or unravelling in its suspended state of entropy.