Fifteen years ago Cambodian art was virtually non-existent. Just a handful of painters practised their trade and typically their focus was restricted to the horrors of the Killing Fields and war or traditional copies of Angkor Wat and pleasant rural scenes.
‘Next Life’, a painting by Oeur Sokuntevy.
But as the country's tempo shifts so has its culture. Cambodia has gone from a nation ravaged by war to one of the region's top tourist destinations supported in part by a fledgling manufacturing base _ and its art scene is growing up alongside it. Artists are becoming more in tune with a rapidly normalising society.
Nico Mesterharm, director of the Meta House Art Gallery in Phnom Penh, arrived in the country from his native Germany more than a decade ago. Cambodian art then was defined by artists who did little more than depict traditional motifs to be sold to tourists for a few dollars.
"When I first came here in 2000, there was obviously no art scene at all. All we saw were commercial artists."
That's changed. He says local artists are now fusing Cambodian traditions with the modern styles and borrowing ideas from abroad. This has allowed them to move away from the rigid, two-dimensional depictions of temples and farmers working the rice fields that were standard fare before the country's 30-year war.
The only respite from that came from portraits of life under the Khmer Rouge, who all but obliterated traditional culture and banned all forms of visual art except for purely political purposes. The likes of Vann Nath, survivor of the infamous S21 extermination camp found fame through his paintings of torture and death.
Artist Chhim Sothy. PHOTO:LUKE HUNT
Mr Mesterharm said the country's art scene really started to change in 2005, when about 25 Cambodian contemporary artists started a project called Visual Arts Open, sparking the move towards contemporary arts and away from painting copies of landscapes or portraits to emphasising interpretation.
Artists trained at the Fine Arts School in Phnom Penh or in Battambang, 300km west of the capital, were already adept in using traditional techniques and began experimenting with different materials and styles.
"This was somehow the beginning of a young Cambodian contemporary arts scene," he said. "They see also that there is a thriving art scene in neighbouring countries Thailand and Vietnam. So they learn from other countries, from the achievements [there]."
Mr Mesterharm said local art was now starting to find a place at home and on international markets.
Among the new breed of artists is Chhim Sothy. His paintings fetch up to US$3,000 (95,200 baht) each and have been exhibited across Asia, in Europe and the US. Like other painters, he says the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge dominated his early work. Religion and Buddhism were also major influences.
But he now looks at other sources of inspiration, including the more mundane, often associated with everyday life.
"For my favourite painting, I like more contemporary art or abstract art like Picasso, William Kooning, Gauguin or van Gogh," he said during an exhibition at the Lost Room in Phnom Penh.
He also enjoys likening himself to a monk in search of wisdom, adding: "Now I have changed a lot. My work is more about the family, about the people around me, sometimes abstract, sometimes it's thinking about real life."
Mother and child is a constant theme in Chhim Sothy's art. He also mixes mythical characters from Hindu poems with depictions of man as an explorer of life, painting oil on canvas with many shades of green, blues and lots of red, especially in his nudes which are not necessarily erotic but relate more to urban family life.
"I'm very happy because I have developed a lot."
Artist Oeur Sokuntevy.
The resurgence and fusion of local classical art with outside contemporary influences is changing the cultural landscape. Film, dance and music have also witnessed a reawakening and more galleries are opening.
Then there are the more outrageous among Cambodia's new crop of artists.
Oeur Sokuntevy likes to poke fun at traditional Khmer values which impose harsh restrictions on women who are expected to be highly moral, marry young and have children. Known as Tevy and described by one critic as the "trippiest" artist in the country, she has also found fame by using animals instead of people like a muscle-bound gay elephant washing the hair of a monkey as satire of Cambodia's middle class women, their hairdressers and indulgence of make-up, once anathema in communist Cambodia.
"I started drawing my family and friends around me and people in Cambodia. Then I supplemented the people with animals we are all related because we all live in the same community," she said.
Young artists usually fetch between $450 and $800 a painting which is in line with their peers elsewhere in Asia. But Mr Mesterharm says there are still nagging problems concerning local art, in particular the tendency to only depict what is considered beautiful. Artists remain reluctant to focus on social issues in a country where poverty, corruption and impunity among the ruling elite are endemic.
"Most of the art is quite colourful. People try to work with different materials. They work in the fields of sculpture, painting and photography. They also try to do something which is Cambodian. They try to find their own identity. Only if they do so, will [they] also find a market because this is what this scene still lacks _ a local market and an international market," Mr Mesterharm said.
Still, Chhim Sothy feels his work has come a long way compared to what he was producing after graduating from the Institute of Culture and Fine Arts. There he was groomed in rudimentary art that enabled him initially to sell pictures to tourists.
"For some time I ... [mixed] classical and modern art for new art. Now my artwork is so expensive because it's a new creation, it's my concept," he said.
Cambodian art still needs broader recognition but its supporters insist local artists have already achieved a great deal given the destruction of the Khmer Rouge who emptied cities by relocating people to rural communes when they came to power in 1975.
Most of the capital's intelligentsia were slaughtered. Many more died in the years of war that followed but for now contemporary Cambodian artists have finally taken a prominent spot on their country's cultural landscape and their future looks bright.