Cambodia’s most internationally prominent contemporary artist, Sopheap Pich has just opened Morning Glory, a solo exhibition of his new works, ath the Tyler Rollins Fine Art gallery in New York. The show centered on a large-scale sculpture of the morning glory plant.
Often admired for the beauty of its flowers, or decried as an invasive pest, the morning glory is actually a common dinner table staple in Cambodia. Pich recalls it as a vital source of sustenance during the near-famine conditions of the Khmer Rouge period (1975-79), and as such it has a powerful emotional force that evokes issues of survival, family, and basic human togetherness.
The exhibition also features a group of related sculptures made from Pich’s characteristic materials (bamboo, rattan, burlap) with forms referencing social and political issues in Cambodia
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