Ratanakiri Valley Drip

Sopheap Pich

2012 · Bamboo, rattan, steel wire, burlap, beeswax, damar resin, earth pigment, charcoal, plastic twine, oil paint · Modern and Contemporary Art

Pich grew up in Cambodia during the violent and tumultuous era of the Khmer Rouge regime and immigrated to the United States as a teenager. While the collective traumas of his birth country and present home (he returned to Cambodia in 2002) inform his work, Pich’s exposure to Western museums and art movements has led to a complex and hybrid practice that deploys materials as a way to evoke meaning. Here, Pich constructs a seemingly modernist grid with thin bands of indigenous rattan coated using a mixture of wax, resin, and collected earth samples from Cambodia to suggest the landscape of Ratanakiri, in the country’s northeast province—a once verdant and thriving region now ravaged and stripped of its natural resources.

Artist

Sopheap Pich

Date

2012

Medium

Bamboo, rattan, steel wire, burlap, beeswax, damar resin, earth pigment, charcoal, plastic twine, oil paint

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Purchase, Gift of the Leonore S. Gershwin 1987 Trust, by exchange, 2013