Footnotes

Provenance
Sale: Bonhams Hong Kong, 29 March 2018, lot 27
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Private collection, Singapore

Exhibited
London, Heavy Skirt: Leang Seckon, Rossi & Rossi, 31 March to 29 April 2010

Literature
Rossi & Rossi, Heavy Skirt: Leang Seckon, London, 2010, unpaginated

Leang Seckon
覆蓋裙子
混合媒材畫布 木框　
2009年作

簽名：Seckon, 09 (右下）

來源
拍賣：香港，邦瀚斯，2018年3月29日，拍品編號27
現藏家得自上述來源
新加坡私人收藏

展覽
「沈重裙子──Leang Seckon」，Rossi & Rossi，倫敦，2010年3月31至4月29日

出版
《沈重裙子──Leang Seckon》，Rossi & Rossi，倫敦，2010年，無頁碼

Leang Seckon was born into the deep poverty of the Prey Veng province, Cambodia, and directly experienced the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge regime. Almost a generation of artists was wiped out during the genocidal years, leaving an undeniable gap and a palpable legacy in Cambodian art, upon which Leang reflects in his creative practice. Leang's perceptions of his native land's socio-political history are communicated through his highly autobiographical works.

The present lot draws poignant references to the heaviness of history and his family's difficult circumstances during the civil war of the early 1970s. The somphut or skirt that his mother wore whilst she was pregnant with him was old and quilted with patches, because his family's subsistence-level earnings from the rice farm did not generate enough money for new clothing. The thick fabric suggests the burden of survival in the face of relentless hunger from the start of the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1965 until the Vietnamese army overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.

Images including the mythical serpent, old age and suffering are presented in rows of circular motifs like falling bombs. In the process of catharsis, however, flowers and Buddhist iconography emerge, transforming scarred memories into a garden of new life, seemingly to convey that the tumultuous history of modern Cambodia also breed creativity and hope.