NOV CHEANIK

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 offer a dramatically different take on the purpose and potential diversity of portraiture.

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. 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. (Written by Erin Gleeson, Director and Curator of Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh, Cambodia)