Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are multiple things entering in your mind.
The family I grew up in had three generations of widows.
Sometimes it may be something I hear in the news that affects me.
I've been coming to Cambodia off and on, six months of the year usually.
I think that through the narratives of other people you get closer to your own.
I'm very connected to the story, the history, and the trauma people experience.
You have to experiment with different mediums and things around you [making art].
I think there are things I can't write in English that I wish I could write in Khmer.
I'd like to do more collaborations because collaboration creates different viewpoints.
This is my first collaboration [with Mary Hamill] so I'm going to learn how it's going to work.
I liked museums but I wanted to be a dancer, I wanted to go into performing arts, or be a writer.
If I were really fluent and born into the English language, I would probably become a greater writer.
I thought of the pillowcases as a symbol of love and loss, of retaining the memory of your loved one.
All throughout my work, even in the United States, I have worked with the greater Cambodian community.
For me, the more I understand the story of others, the greater I am able to learn and help other people.
I started to paint in the year 2000. I never thought of going to an art school, even though I loved art.
I don't approach my writing or my work from an academic or analytical point of view. I do it for myself.
You get closer to your own humanity by understanding the stories of other people and the struggles they have.
When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away.
When you're reading from a different language that's different from your own, it's not the same as being fluent.
Even if you look in the dictionary you know the meaning of the word or phrase, but there's still the feeling of it.
It's hard to choose the right word, the right line. This Body Mystery is a small book, but it took me over ten years.
I think that there are certain feelings and things you can convey in a simple form that people can see and understand.
When you make art, those things change shape into something else. It's transformation into a body of different visual elements.
Art is really about how you capture different things you see around you and bring them into forms and words and shapes and meaning.
I am a community social psychologist and a lot of my work deals with social work and helping people overcoming addiction and trauma.
I tried to write poems in rhyme. I tried writing songs. Sometimes I jotted down a thought. I would keep a log of spontaneous thoughts.
I write and I write and a lot of times I go back to the American lens, though sometimes it's a struggle to come from that perspective.
In Cambodian culture the male figure in the family is important; when you lose your husband you lose your economic ability to survive.
I read a lot when I was in school in the United States, and even though writing in English is very difficult for me, I wrote in journals.
A lot of my work is process-oriented. I delve into my work and sit alone in silence and work with the material and process it, like talking to yourself.
How am I placing myself in the world of other people around me? For me, I feel that I am not really alone, that others can feel it too. I see art in this way.
Often when people tell their story, they talk about their strengths and resiliency. It's really about their determination and their aspiration to survive and live.
I'm doing a collaborative project with another artist, Mary Hamill. My project is to gather the oral history of war widows, starting with the women of my village, Kop Nymit.
It's really hard when you read literature in a language that's not your own. There are all these cultural references you have to be born into that particular language to get.
Sometimes the mere connection we make with each other can change people's lives. It doesn't have to be something big. The mere fact that you're interested in them makes them happy.
It's like you're organically developing yourself, moving out, metamorphosing into other forms depending on where you are, what you're doing at the time, how you want to play on things.
I used to despair about the condition of the world, to feel a sense of hopelessness; now I find more and more that I need to focus on what I can do, however little it is, to help others.
I have a great advantage: I write from the perspective of my own voice. I'm not copying anyone's voice. It's my voice. I have the advantage of being a writer of English as a second language.
I think every person has a unique story to tell and we each have the different life events that happen to us and sometimes we may feel sympathetic toward a certain aspect of that life event.
Every day you are bombarded by so many different things. When you sit down to process everything, it can become interesting visually. You can incorporate a lot of those things that you internalize.
In This Body Mystery, even though it was written in the voice of people with HIV/AIDS, it's about how people come to accept their fate and their sickness. It's about accepting the way your life is.
I'm also developing my own narrative, because I'm the son of a widow. And so, while working with women and gathering their oral histories, I'm taking a step back to do my own art book and visual work.
When I was in the sixth grade my friend and I always won writing contests, and we read a lot of books. We were always the ones that read the most books in class. I thought about writing but visual arts weren't part of my vocabulary.
Even though I'm not privileged in the money world, I'm privileged in other ways: I had greater access to education, I can travel, etc. It's the same with writing: the freedom to move in and out of different places, of different realms of existence, of different life forms.
Sometimes I fantasize about learning to write in Khmer. Because if I could write in Khmer, my perspective would be very different, because I'm both an outsider and insider and I see the writing in a different way. My description would be different from, say, a local writer.
Everything around you can use. It's like your tools and your material. Whether it's in performing arts like dance, or visual arts, or poetry, a lot of those elements can come and help you, can trigger your creativity. But you have to be open, be aware, and you have to be ready to look.
I think every writer has their waves of inspiration and their ways of doing things. But writing is very difficult for me. It's something I haven't practiced as diligently as my visual art. I've been doing visual art because I think it's easier for me to construct, whereas words are very difficult.
Some people have witnessed the killing of their husbands, or they survived other horrific things. My sister is a widow but her husband was killed after the Khmer Rouge. There are different periods in which violence has occurred, and differences in how these women became widowed and how they survived afterwards.
Mary's [Hamill] working from an outsider perspective and I'm working from an insider-outside perspective. In this case, it will bring an added dimension to the visual aspects of the work. Also the processes and approaches that I'm thinking are about learning. I'm playing it by ear to experiment and see what happens.