20: A Close-Up Look at Cambodian Artist Touch Khchao

One of the first people we met in Battambang -- Cambodia's second-largest city and resurgent arts hub -- was British ex-Pat, Darren Swallow. Darren is the kind of person you'd like to meet first in every city. He's friendly, outgoing, knowledgeable, seems to know just about everybody in town, is co-owner of the three-storey Lotus Bar Gallery (on Street 2.5), and is also co-owner of the funkiest memorabilia shop this side of Portobello Road.

As we talked to Darren and looked around at his eclectic collection, our eyes kept being drawn to a number of extremely colourful and detailed prints that were clearly of a contemporary and local nature. Darren promised to introduce us to the artist, which he did a while later when his wife -- the other co-owner of Lotus, and the memorabilia store -- Touch Kchao, entered the shop.

Street Art Piece by Touch Just Outside Lotus

Like Darren, Touch was open, friendly and communicative, but in the quiet and smiling way that is characteristic of many Cambodians. She is a graduate of Battambang's famous art school, Phare Ponleu Selpak and one of the city's most successful artists. She is also someone with strong and well-formed opinions about women's issues and the environment. We enjoyed talking with her about these and other issues over the course of a couple of days.

Touch was already well-known in Battambang. She had exhibited a powerful and colourful series of paintings (Restful Places) focusing on the need women have for a place -- not in the external world, but deep within their hearts -- where they can be free and relax in peace, joy and tranquility. The images are truly incredible and you could study them for hours:

 Restful Place No.1      

Restful Place No.2     

Restful Place No.3

Restful Place No.6

Fortunately for Touch, but not so much for us, she had already sold all of the originals in the series, so we ended up buying two of her limited edition prints and one printed on canvas:

This Love is for You

The Sun at Night

(Title Unknown)




The next day we spoke with Touch about her painting technique and her current projects. She was eager to show us some of her new works, but they were at home. In Canada that would normally mean that she would bring in a few canvases the next day and we would drop by the store again to see them. In Cambodia it meant coming back to the store a few hours later -- after Touch had picked up her daughter from school and taken her to daycare, then hopping on the back of her motorcycle and riding off to her home.

It must be said that motor biking in Cambodia is not exactly what you would call relaxing -- hundreds of motorcycles of every size, shape and age wove in and out of traffic, no one staying in their lanes (were there lanes?) and hardly any traffic lights, which didn't really matter since no one paid attention to them any. It didn't help that neither of us had been on a motorcycle in several decades, something that would come back to haunt Heather as she tried to dismount and rammed her knee into the metal frame.

As we entered Touch's home studio, our hearts still firmly in our throats, we were greeted by an array of incredibly detailed and colourful paintings in various shapes and sizes. One, called Everything Grows from Her, we immediately fell in love with:

Everything Grows from Her

But there was a problem. There was a small hole in the canvas and Touch would have to reweave and paint it. That would take too long for us -- we were off to Siem Reap the next day -- but in the meantime Touch showed us her technique which involved taking a pointed bamboo stick, dipping it into paint and, in a flurry of brushstrokes, applying it to a very small bit of the canvas. This was hard, detailed and time-consuming work and we could easily see how it could take up to a year to create a large artwork.

We also saw a number of other interesting originals that we would have purchased on the spot:

Yellow Flower

Wonderland in a Tree

To us they appeared finished. But we realized that Touch was looking at them through different eyes. Where we saw completion, she saw colours and images to be added, brushstrokes to be strengthened, and textures to be changed. She thought it would take another six months to finish.

But we also saw -- and Touch confirmed -- that she was an artist who was very much attached to her work as an outgrowth of her person and her culture. It was almost as hard for her to part with a painting as it was to part with a member of her family. And why not? It  only took nine months to deliver a baby. It required a full year to create a painting.

If you love Touch Khchao's work as much as we do, and you're happy with limited edition prints, please do yourself a favour and visit her website:
http://touch-khchao.fineartamerica and buy something. We don't get a penny out of it -- just the satisfaction of knowing that another very talented artist is gaining exposure and reaching her potential.

19. Battambang, Cambodia: Back from Genocide

(Mural in Battambang painted by five artists)

The city of Battambang was once -- and may yet be again -- Cambodia's cultural capital. Before the 1975-79 genocide that wiped out up to two-million people, it was home to many of Cambodia's most prominent artists. This included the man known as "The Cambodian Elvis", Sinn Sisamouth and the woman regarded as the best female rock singer, Ros Sereysothea:

Unfortunately, musicians, artists and intellectuals were among the first victims targeted by the Khmer Rouge. Sisamouth and Sereysothea, and eventually one in four or five Cambodians, died in the holocaust.

Today, Battambang, despite being the country's second-largest city, has a tranquil stillness to it that is missing in dusty, congested, noisy and motorcycle-strewn capital Phnom Penh and (gateway to Angkor Wat) Siem Reap. It's sort of a quiet melange of Chinese shop houses,  French colonial buildings, and trendy restaurants, pubs and art galleries.

More than three-and-a-half decades after the Khmer Rouge were kicked off their genocidal perch by the Vietnamese, Battambang is finally beginning to re-emerge as Cambodia's cultural hub. It has more artists per-capita than any other Cambodian city. It's now considered alright, even good, to be an artist. Better still, it's safe to admit to it.

Battambang has a very strong cultural support infrastructure anchored by the performing arts school Phare Ponleu Selpak. Phare, as it's known for short, has more than 1,000 young, disadvantaged Cambodians studying circus skills, as well as theatre, painting, drawing, design and animation.

Cambodia is a very youthful country. The median age, depending on which source you believe, is 21-24. They bring a tremendous vitality and energy - and a lot of colour - to both their street and canvas art. Take, for example, our masthead photo. In fact, let's break it down a bit. The woman on the far left is Ros Sereysothea, painted by 29-year-old, self-taught artist Chov Theanly:

Theanly (Cambodians list their first names last), who can usually be found painting with oil on canvas, frequently shows his figures with their noses just above a "waterline" to underscore that Cambodians are barely surviving.

The next two parts of the mural were painted by 32-year-old Khchao Touch:

Obviously, there's some patch-up work needed, which Touch will take care of as soon as she can find a spare moment away from being a mother, wife, and co-owner of a store and restaurant/bar/art gallery.

Like Theanly, Touch does most of her work on canvas. Unlike Theanly, she is a graduate of Phare. We spent a pleasant few hours with Touch and you'll find out more about her and her art in our next post.

One part of the mural virtually screams out to be noticed:

It's by Long Kosal. Unfortunately, we couldn't discover much about him except the obvious: he's a graduate of Phare and likes painting large format portraiture, usually in the colour orange. We know even less about the artist who painted the final piece of the mural, Nhem Pearun.

One thing we do know a lot about is the restaurant behind the wall. It's called Jai Baan (Rice Bowl) and is a social enterprise that takes kids off the streets, teaches them restaurant skills on site, as well as English. It consistently ranks as the No.1 or 2 Battambang restaurant on Trip Advisor. And that's not a sympathy vote - we can attest to that personally. During our meal there, the service was excellent, the wait staff was very professional and friendly, they could answer questions about the food, and the pan-Asian food was the best we had in our three weeks in Cambodia. They also display and sell art inside the restaurant.

Another great place to see street and other forms of art is the Sammaki Gallery, an artist-run, not-for-profit, community art space:

The inside wall surrounding the art space is brightly decorated with street art by the likes of Ot Veasna:

 

A. THY

 

 

And a few artists that are unknown to us:

 

As we entered the gallery, we could see a number of Ot's canvas works placed carefully on the floor. Clearly, the gallery was preparing for an exhibition of his works:

Ot was definitely the man of the hour, because he also had another show on at the same time at the Lotus Gallery Bar.

The Lotus is co-owned by Touch and her husband Darren Swallow. In Battambang, artists don't compete against each other, they help each other climb to new heights.

There's probably one more thing you should know about Ot. We didn't tell you about it up front because we wanted you to view him first as what he is: an enormously talented, wildly imaginative and hugely creative artist.

But he's also had a tough life, even by Cambodian standards. Ot's father ran away when his mother was pregnant with him. He was born unable to hear or speak. His mother kept him out of school, so he can't read or write and can only sign a little. And yet what a truly amazing world and cast of characters he has invented for himself - and for us. Yet another example of the strength and resilience of the Cambodian spirit.

18. We Get by with a Little Help from our Friends (Part II)

JUI JUIS

The Travelling Apples (see previous post) weren't the only bloggers to respond to our cri de coeur for help in finding Chiang Mai's best street art. We also heard from Lani Cox, who writes the witty, zany, and eponymous blog, Life, the Universe and Lani. If you'd like a good laugh while learning a lot about the ex-pat life, you owe it to yourself to check it out: lanivcox.wordpress.com

Lani was born in Hawaii to a Thai mother and Chinese father. She's lived in a zillion places, making her a real child of the universe. Or at least a child of planet earth - though it wouldn't surprise if she'd done a stint or two on a Jovian moon. For purposes of our tale, however, what you need to know is that she lived in Chiang Mai and was up on the local street-art scene. 

Life, is full of strange coincidences. One of the locations that Lani recommended was well-away from the centre of the city and mostly invisible from the street. But, as it turned out, it was also just around the corner from where we were taking an all-day Thai cooking course. After class, with our bellies full of springs rolls, Tom Yam Goong, glass noodles, garlic shrimp, fried bananas and a number of other Thai delicacies, we waddled over to the street art and started shooting.

Many of the murals were created as part of a 2013 campaign to promote literacy:



NHHS

 



YUREE KENSAKU (Bangkok)

 

(detail from previous picture)

 

SOPER (France)

 

MISS INK (FOR Crew, Bangkok)

 

 

 

 

As you can see, Thailand has a lot of talented street artists working its neighbourhoods. If only they could find the nerve to come out of the shadows and the alleys, and showcase their art on its streets.

 

Well, that's a wrap on our series of posts on Thailand. Next up, Cambodia.

 

 



17. We Get by with a Little Help from our Friends (Part 1)

In the normal course of street-art-hunting, we usually find it fairly easy to track down our targets, even if we're in a city that we're unfamiliar with. Our not-so-magic-formula includes: hours of research on the Internet; wearing away inches of shoe leather on the streets; and engaging locals in conversation about the community art scene.

But every rose has it thorns, and our normal approach just didn't work that well in Chiang Mai. In a city with hundreds of alleys, it just isn't that easy to discover which needle is hiding in which haystack. Sure, we found some pretty decent murals, which we highlighted in our previous two posts. But we knew that much better lay out there. Somewhere. But where?

Luckily, I (Seymour) had been reading -- and very much enjoying -- a blog called Travelling Apples. The "apples" were, in fact, Chris and Sarah Appleford, a young couple from Melbourne who had quit their jobs, sold everything and, along with son Jack, headed off into the great unknown -- blogging about it all the way. I found their writing to be witty and informative and their advice will be especially helpful to adults travelling with the wee folk. (You should check it out at: www.travellingapples.com)

Most importantly for us, they had lived in Chiang Mai, biked it's streets and alleys, and Sarah had even written a post about Chiang Mai street art that was accompanied by her amazing photos. She had clearly found the motherload that we'd been looking for.

Knowing that bloggers are friendly and helpful folk, I dashed off an e-mail to the Travelling Apples asking if they could point us in the right direction. Chris wrote back almost immediately, providing not only guidance, but Google maps and street photos as well. With that advice in hand, we were able to track down the brilliant elephant mural above, the butterfly-themed murals by Iagazzo featured in our last post, and the following colourful murals:

Even better, the Applefords gave us permission to use any of Sarah's photos from Chiang Mai. So once again, with our gratitude to the Travelling Apples, we offer you the following murals:

 

 

So, the world really is, what my old graduate school communications professor, Marshall McLuhan, liked to call a "global village". If you're having trouble at your end of the street, just reach out to one of your digital neighbours. Chances are they'll come through in spades.