About the Artist

Sopheap Pich is widely considered to be Cambodia’s most internationally prominent contemporary artist.

 

Born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1971, Pich moved with his family to the United States in 1984. After receiving his BFA (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1995) and MFA (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), he returned to Cambodia in 2002, where he began working with local materials – bamboo, rattan, burlap from rice bags, beeswax and earth pigments gathered from around Cambodia – to make sculptures inspired by bodily organs, vegetal forms, and abstract geometric structures.

 

Pich’s childhood experiences during the genocidal conditions of late 1970s Cambodia had a lasting impact on his work, informing its themes of time, memory, and the body.

 

His sculptures stand out for their subtlety and power, combining refinement of form with a visceral, emotive force.