iOne Digital Art Contest
You don’t have to be lucky!
Winning is all about skill & creativity!
If you’re a student, register now and win big, big prizes!
Hurry contest closes on 30th September 2010.
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The last chance to see the CSP before France, before September, before the return of the Space Commander. Note Khmer-friendly start time of 7.30 pm – bring your Khmer friends to hear the old Ros Serey Sothea and Pen Ron songs sung like the old times!

Where: Equinox, St 278, Phnom Penh
When: When: July 31st, 2010 – 19:30 – 23:30

Free of Charge, given by our Singaporean partner, topic: Activities you can do with your child to enhance his Literacy, Maths, Science and other developmental areas. Call now to book the limited place at Sovana Mall. The event is on the ground floor of Sovana on July 31st.

Bring to you by Cambridge Child Development Centre, franchised from Singapore.

Where: Sovana Mall, Phnom Penh
When: July 31st, 2010 · 02:00 – 05:00

Come shrug goodbye, and witness drama of who will win Patrick Falby’s Vespa. One raffle ticket for $2, three for $5. (Please, no jokes asking whether the kid comes with it).

Patrick Falby is a foreign correspondent with global news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), who is leaving Cambodia after some years in the Kingdom. Details of who’s going here.

Where: Magnolia Restaurant, 55, St Pasteur (51) at corner of 242, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Time: Friday, July 30th, 2010 · 18:00 – 22:00

Sa Sa Art Gallery is honored to present the duet Farmers & Freshies, an exhibition of portraiture by two of Cambodia’s young emerging artists Nov Cheanick (1989) and Ouk Sochivy (1986).

In Cambodia, portraits are commonly commissioned by people seeking their representative likeness, or even an enhancement or perfection of their likeness. “Realism” is the expected and respected result, whether in the form of photography or painting. Nov Cheanick’s Farmers and Ouk Sochivy’s Freshies offer a dramatically different take on the purpose and potential diversity of portraiture. The artist’s similarities begin and end with their practice of painting uncommissioned, anonymous portraits as a means of personal expression. It is their differences however – both in artistic gesture and their choice of representative community – that stimulate a synergetic conversation beyond art and towards contemporary Cambodian society.

Nov grew up in rural Battambang province, where he lives today, and where he finds the subjects for his paintings: subsistent rice farmers, both men and women, young and old. Ouk is an urbanite. Born, raised, and living in Phnom Penh, her subjects depict a new identity in the Khmer culture: Freshies – the winners and followers of increasingly common beauty and talent contests for youth.
Nov differentiates himself from his subjects – his outlook of a bright future is connected to having finished high school and continuing his art education, while he connects the farmer’s struggle and poverty in part to their absence of formal education. It is not only a lack of education of course that sidelines farmers from their once respected position in Khmer society and culture. Although they remain one of Cambodia’s most valuable populations and resources today, they struggle from loose and changing law and land titles, land grabbing, rarity of irrigation systems or machinery or storage, and an expanding national economy that lures them to urban areas, to name but a few circumstances.

Like the farmer’s precarious, nature-dependent livelihoods, Nov’s process is also mercurial. He considers his black ink paintings on paper an emotional process -the reactive moment when the water and ink meet is a metaphor for our reaction to unpredictable circumstances in life. Removing his subjects from their original context and titling them by number only further extends this metaphor to the audience – as we “meet” these blurred and anonymous faces, we can only meet our own associations and emotions.

Although Ouk’s subjects are also unnamed, she identifies closely with the community she paints. The Freshie Boys and Girls contest was first sponsored by a telephone company a decade ago and has since contributed to a new breed of Cambodian youth modeled after the contest categories: beauty and fashion sense inspired by globalised trends from neighboring Asian metropolises like Hong Kong and Seoul, interpersonal skills, formal education, and performing or artistic skills.

Ouk’s process is not only that of a painter, but equally a stylist. She pairs elements from magazines, snapshots, and often her own details as she decides what backdrop, clothing and accessories, hair-style, make-up, and pose her characters will take. The resulting flat, colorful oil paintings on canvas recall both playful, child-like renderings of stylish grown-ups while they offer a window to the new role model of many Cambodian youth today.
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10 years of quicky color comics. Free booze. Artist talk August 24. (Preview @ Chaktomuk Aug 07 – 11.)

When: 18 August · 18:00 – 21:00
Where: Java Café & Gallery, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Female Burmese artist Khin Zaw Latt (born 1980) won the first prize at Myanmar Contemporary Art Awards 2008.

After several exhibitions in her home country and residencies in India, Nepal and Malaysia, we are proud to host Khin Zaw Latt’s first exhibition in Cambodia.

After the opening be our guest in our cinema for THE BURMESE HARP by Kon Ichikawa (Japan, 116mins, 1956). This film, magnificently shot in black and white, remains one of Japanese cinema’s most overwhelming antiwar statements.

We are following the actions of a young Japanese officer separated from his battalion in Burma and his silence transformation from warrior to Buddhist monk.

Where: New Meta House – Cambodian German Cultural Center, #37 Sothearos Blvd. opposite of Buildbright / Phnom Penh centre
When: Wednesday Jul. 28, 18:00