Time is played by a serpent in Sopheak Sam’s (b.1989, Thai-Cambodian border) first solo exhibition, រង់ចាំចូលនិព្វាន Waiting for Enlightenment. Traversing picture planes and video screens, the serpent is a pervasive multidimensional being, but like other symbolic beings of western evil and sin, it is demonized for ruination or pillaged for pleasure—never permitted a peaceful journey to self transformation or enlightenment. Sam’s multidisciplinary work comprising drawings, paintings, artist books, and video traces cultural hybridity, queer futurity, religious iconography, and the fabulation of a marred political history between the U.S. and Cambodia. A child refugee born in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide, the artist’s personal entanglement with the historicization of the Khmer experience posits the exhibition as an embodied site for individual and collective searching. Crawled from an existential fever dream, the serpent is an avatar that cruises through liminal spaces of representation, duality, belonging, spirituality, and utopia. It is birthed infinitely from a recurring cycle of displacement, loss, and love.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an intimate publication created in collaboration between Sopheak Sam and Melissa Teng, multimedia artist and City of Boston Artist-in-Residence.
On view: June 1 – July 9
Opening Reception: Saturday June 11, 7 - 10pm
Please contact sopheak@sopheaksam.com for purchasing artwork and other inquiries.
