Artist Talk with Sopheap Pich: Wading, Ploughing, Waiting
Free and open to the public. No registration is required.
Sopheap Pich is widely considered to be Cambodia’s most internationally prominent contemporary artist. In 1979, when the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia led to the ousting of the Khmer Rouge regime, he fled with his family to Thailand, spending four years in refugee camps before immigrating to the United States. Memories of traveling vast distances on foot and witnessing the devastation of war — broken bodies, ravaged landscapes, abandoned artillery, ruined buildings, and the breakdown of social and cultural institutions — underpin his early sculptural practice.
Pich’s work is featured in the UMMA exhibition Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia, curated by U‑M History of Art Professor Nachiket Chanchani and on view February 3 — July 2024. As crises of public health, economic instability, authoritarian regimes, racial injustice, and climate change spread around the globe, millions are experiencing distress, conflict, uncertainty, and vulnerability. This troubling combination of experiences is nothing new for Cambodians. Between 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, about a quarter of the country’s population died of infectious diseases, weapon wounds, and malnutrition.
Angkor Complex brings together more than 80 works of art spanning a millennium to present how the visual culture of Cambodia and its diaspora has changed in the face of upheavals. Angkor Complex also allows viewers to encounter the still-fresh scars of a genocide and critically appreciate the strategies evolved to nurture resilience in trying times.
More about the Artist While Pich studied painting, earning a BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1995), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999), he turned his attention to sculpture after returning to Cambodia in 2002 where he laboriously began working with local materials – bamboo, old rafters, rattan, burlap, beeswax, broken utensils, and earth pigments gathered from his local surroundings. Pich’s works have been collected and shown in many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Centre George Pompidou, the Mori Art Museum, M+, and the National Gallery of Singapore, as well as many international exhibitions including the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), Documenta 13 (2012), the 6th Asia Pacific Triennale (2009), the Setouchi Triennale (2022), and the Guangju Biennale (2023), among others. He lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Sopheap Pich: Wading, Ploughing, Waiting is the 2024 Doris Sloan Memorial Program. Established through the generosity of Dr. Herbert Sloan, this annual program honors one of the Museum’s most ardent friends and supporters, Doris Sloan, a long-time UMMA docent.
Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the U-M Office of the Provost, U-M Office of the President, National Endowment for the Arts, Michigan Arts and Culture Council, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Eleanor Noyes Crumpacker Endowment Fund, U-M Ross School of Business, U-M Department of History of Art, Mark and Julie Phillips, U-M Center for Southeast Asian Studies, US Department of Education Title VI grant, and an anonymous donor. Additional generous support is provided by the U-M Department of Asian Languages and Cultures.
