ART THERAPY: FACES STARE BACK
A Bicultural Social Worker-cum-Artist Tackles History Through Emotional Portaiture
By Emily Lodish
THE CAMBODIA DAILY (February 17-18, 2007)
To hear him tell it, the refugee camp Chath pierSath was taken to in 1981 when he was 10 years old - Arranyaprathet camp 15, located just the other side of the Thai border - wasn't all that bad.
"You could run around and play," the 36-year-old artist originally from Banteay Meanchey province recalled in an interview last month. ''There was a vegetable garden and a school run by the French."
But it was perhaps here that Chath pierSath began the struggle central to his art living on the border between two places and not at home in either one.
After the refugee camp he spent six months in the Philippines and then went on to the US where he landed in the state of Colorado. Later, he went to college in California.
In 1994, he returned to Cambodia for the first time and has been splitting his time-eight months a year in Cambodia, four in the US - since then.
Portraits of the sick, the impoverished and the disregarded cover the walls of Java Cafe, where Chath pierSath's exhibition "lights and Shadows" runs through Feb 25.
In the margins of society there is room for everyone: those sick with AIDS, sex workers who have been abused and beggars in need of food, Chath pierSath said.
The highlight of the exhibit is a series of small portraits, each roughly the size of a postcard, grouped together in what resembles a patchwork quilt.
Chath pierSath calls it a colorful, emotional interpretation of the black-and-white photographs grouped in a similar fashion on the ground floor of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
But unlike the photos at Tuol Sleng, in which a prisoners' individuality bleeds through the subtlest difference of expression, the figures in Chath pierSath's paintings express their anguish in gestures and boldly divert a viewer's gaze by covering a portion of their face or looking off to the side.
Each figure depicted seems to push against the sides of the frame, fighting even with the edges of the canvas.
The paintings on another wall in the exhibit are made from predominantly dark colors. Large faces, often distorted in some way, take up most of each canvas in this series. Figures seem almost as if they have been roused from a fitful sleep or raised from the dead.
"Emerging out of the dark, invisible in society, little people," says Chath pierSath, ''we all exist like that begging for something, looking for something.
An observer in his country of birth, Chath pierSath looks at Phnom Penh today and sees it changing - for the worse.
"More people drive a Lexus," he said. "It's all about power and material wealth. People who drive a Lexus get away from the traffic law."
"I feel uncomfortable here, I see people re-creating Khmer Rouge conditions with the haves and have-not, the insecurity and inequity," he adds.
But in the US, where you might be safer physically, Chath pierSath feels life is too focused on work and lacks a spiritual core," he said.
For him, the US is "a country with a lot of freedom and security, yet the meaning and purpose is lacking in your life," he said.
Chath pierSath has worked as a social worker in the US and Cambodia, often using art in therapy sessions with his clients, but now he paints in search of his own peace of mind.
"I don't belong to a place," he said. "The faces [that I paint] make me feel more human, more at home in a way."