Old bathtub

Capturing otherwise ephemeral moments, Svay Ken’s paintings depict events from his life and that of his family. As a 14-year-old novice Buddhist monk, he relocated from Cambodia’s rural Takeo province to the capital Phnom Penh. He later worked at the luxury hotel Le Royal until the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 and the city’s two million inhabitants were forcibly evacuated to the countryside. Svay Ken went to work the fields in Takeo until 1979 when the Khmer Rouge were ousted by the Vietnamese army. After he returned to the city and work at the hotel, he started to draw and paint, eventually opening a small streetside gallery.

Svay Ken presented contemporary Cambodia as he saw it, and as he remembered it. His subjects range from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge period to scenes of his life at the hotel and in the temple, as well as market stalls, family and friends, and mundane objects such as ceiling fans, powerlines and this discarded claw-foot bathtub.