Born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1971, Sopheap Pich is one of Southeast Asia’s most significant contemporary artists. Growing up under the Khmer Rouge regime before fleeing to refugee camps in Thailand, the Philippines, and eventually the United States, Pich’s early life was shaped by displacement, survival, and craft. These formative experiences continue to inform his sculptural language, with an enduring focus on materiality, memory, and the relationship between body, land, and time.

Known for his labour-intensive process and use of humble, locally rooted materials—bamboo, rattan, beeswax, scrap metal—Pich’s work speaks quietly but powerfully to histories of violence, resilience, and regeneration. His most recent commission, Further Afield, unveiled last month at esea contemporary in Manchester, UK, is a contemplative bamboo structure threaded with burned and blackened forms. Suggestive of scaffolding or landscape, it echoes the delicate thresholds between presence and absence, construction and decay.

Earlier this year, Pich’s debut solo exhibition at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong, Cambodian Metal—presented during Art Basel Hong Kong and running through to 24 May—marked a significant new direction. Created using salvaged aluminium, recycled rice pots, bamboo, soot, and blown glass, the series of wall reliefs and sculptures draws from the industrial vernacular of Phnom Penh’s cityscape while maintaining a deeply personal connection to craft traditions and improvised tools from Pich’s childhood. The work signals an expansion of his material vocabulary while remaining grounded in the improvisational, tactile world of his past.

In this interview, Sopheap Pich speaks with CNTRFLD.ART about how memory, migration, and material continue to shape his evolving practice—tracing connections between childhood resourcefulness, the enduring shadow of conflict, and the quiet poetry of form.

“When you are from a country that killed off almost all of its artists and intellectuals in a genocidal revolution, it is hard to think about what culture really means to me.”—Sopheap Pich

CNTRFLD. You were born in Battambang and spent your early childhood in Cambodia before fleeing with your family in 1979. What memories stand out to you from that time, and have any of them stayed with you as emotional or visual reference points in your work?

SP. During the Khmer Rouge, my father was a metalsmith, and his shop was under our hut. I used to help him hammer, file, cut and sand the things he made for the village. I remember making a mold with him and we poured melted aluminum into it to make a spoon. In a sense that was my introduction to sculpture. I also remember seeing war remnants for the first time when the rule of the Khmer Rouge came to an end. Inside a destroyed temple I saw blood spattered all over the wall, and this inspired my first Buddha piece. I have many memories of my childhood in Cambodia and growing up in refugee camps, and later the US, and some of these did emerge in my earlier work, but never in a direct way. These days, I think these memories take shape in more abstract rather than literal forms.

CNTRFLD. After leaving Cambodia, you spent four formative years in refugee camps in Thailand before eventually settling in the U.S. How did those experiences—witnessing the aftermath of war, living through displacement, and encountering resilience—shape the way you see the world and express yourself through sculpture? In what ways do those memories continue to live on in your practice today?

SP. While we were in refugee camps in Thailand and Philippines, my father made sure I attended English classes in addition to going to Khmer-style schools. Learning English was something I focused on, which put our attention on the future, rather than the difficult past and the challenging conditions we lived in. He was also learning English and teaching it at the same time as he improved his language skills, which set a good example for me at that age. He always projected a sense of optimism and moving forward which I took after.

This sense of possibility is what I still carry with me and in some ways try to project in my work through subject matter and scale. Early sculptures such as Cycle, Rang Phnom Flower, New Dwellings and Cargo would have been difficult to make without a heavy dose of optimism because they took a lot of time and labor. Works of this scale are not practical, and they tend to sit in the studio for years before they are shown and often return to the studio to be placed in storage. However, it has always been more important for me that these works are done so that we can learn something from the experience of making them. Seeing whether anyone else cares about them afterwards is yet another test.

CNTRFLD. How did your transition from Cambodia to Thailand and then to the United States shape your artistic identity and practice? What cultural elements from your past do you carry with you into your work, particularly after settling in the U.S.?

SP. When you are from a country that killed off almost all of its artists and intellectuals in a genocidal revolution, it is hard to think about what culture really means to me. One memory I have during the Khmer Rouge was that I would hear the slow rhythmic hand drum being played every single morning. It was probably meant as a signal to let the adults know that they had to head to the rice paddies for another day of hard labor. It gave me a foreboding feeling. Another striking memory was from Khao I Dang, the Thai refugee camp my family went to when we first left Cambodia. For half an hour every evening, melodic pop songs from the 1960 and 70s were played over the camp’s loudspeakers. They were often sad love songs by famous Cambodian musicians and artists from before the Khmer Rouge, and which we still listen to today. I remember always feeling that the songs were short, and that each session ended too soon. As I was only a young child then, my memories must have been touched by these experiences differently than if I was older. My parents and relatives were unlikely to have had similar feelings and responses because their existence was consumed by much else. Indeed, music and other forms of art were never an important aspect of my family life in the US. I suppose one of the driving forces behind what I do has always been to overcome the notion given to me that art is not as important as other occupations in life.

Living in different environments, some of them difficult, have allowed me to learn to adapt, be flexible and see things from different perspectives. I am the eldest among five sons. Choosing to pursue art as a career wasn’t what my parents were expecting of me. I credit the one year I spent in Paris before I graduated from the University of Massachusetts as the most impactful in this regard. Being away from my family and having to teach myself a new language was both pressurizing and liberating. Feeling lost in the world was not new to me but I had to figure things out on my own in ways that I did not expect. Fearlessness was necessary. I saw a lot of great art in Paris museums (some of my classes were conducted at the Louvre and the Pompidou) and attended as many exhibition openings in galleries as I could. I also hopped on a bus to Amsterdam to see works by Rembrandt and Flemish masters. Understanding what I was looking at wasn’t the most important thing; rather, staring and drawing was what I needed to do.

Two other study trips I took with the art department before my year in Paris were also important for me. One was to Mexico and was a photographic exploration of the Mayan temples. It was while I was walking through the jungle at Tikal in Guatemala that I knew that I wanted to come back to Cambodia. We also went to France and Italy, visiting many grand museums, and seeing Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus was mind-opening to say the least.

CNTRFLD. When did you first begin to see yourself as an artist? Was there a particular moment, encounter, or influence that helped guide you toward a sculptural practice?

SP. I started to truly see myself as an artist in 2004 when I felt I had lost my way as a painter. It was my third year being back in Cambodia and my own situation, and the realities of what was around me had truly begun to sink in. Seeing struggle and lack everywhere made me question what I was doing, and I felt like painting was not making sense anymore. I was trying to create illusions of reality with painting, and that this was impossible. At that moment, I made my very first sculpture, Silence, and did so with a sense of curiosity, almost just to see if I could. That was when I stopped asking what I was supposed to do and why and knew that I just wanted to make objects. In a sense, working with rattan and metal wire brought me back to a childhood spent making toys or tools to hunt in the fields with. Memories of helping my metalsmith father, and all that he taught me in the process started to come back slowly. After that, making sculpture became an emotional experience, and I understood that if I could just find a way to survive so that I could continue to make sculpture, I would be okay.

CNTRFLD. Your work is deeply tied to materiality—from bamboo and rattan to scrap metal and glass. How do you choose your materials, and what role does physical labour or tactility play in the way you conceptualise and create your pieces?

SP. I have learned to accept that materials have lives of their own and that they speak of the people that used them and the times they lived in. Our need to survive forces us to be inventive and care for the things that we use. In Cambodia, we are people of the farm and are familiar with all manner of ways to use natural materials to make tools, build, grow, and hunt. The bamboo and rattan that I use are poor man’s materials that have multiple uses, and the found aluminum in my work is an everyday object. More contemporary and efficient materials become available as we progress, and the city develops. But they are costlier, so the objects they are used to make are constantly patched up and only discarded when they are beyond repair. Even then, they are not really thrown away but sold for scrap to still earn some money. The way I work shares some similarities with the materials I use. Physical labor and intuition are mostly what my team and I have and depend on. There is emotion involved in working with the hands and I have always trusted this process in bringing about new works.

CNTRFLD. Your latest exhibition, Further Afield, at esea contemporary features a unique bamboo structure. Can you discuss the inspiration behind this work and what you hope viewers will take away from it?

SP. Further Afield is an exercise in how to make something out of limitations. I had reached a point with bamboo where I asked myself, what if I make a work of this scale with very limited materials (in this case bamboo and India ink) but also a circumscribed process which utilizes simple but precise gestures. In this sculpture, the structure is the actual work. The bamboo has been left somewhat rough and un-straightened, and is turned inside out, with its nodes showing. There are two layers, and one can see through both the front and the back when viewing the work from the left or right. The middle third section had been split and wedged with another strand of bamboo, then it was torched and painted with India ink. Afterward, the nodes were chipped off to show the natural bamboo color again.

I would not want to prescribe what people get out of it, but I suppose I hope to capture their attention for a moment. It is a work that requires people to look a little longer at it, which these days is a bit to ask.

CNTRFLD. Much of your work is often described as a conversation between the traditional and the contemporary, the local and the global. Do you see this duality as something you consciously navigate, or does it emerge more intuitively through your relationship with materials and place?

SP. I have grown to accept the different ways that my work takes shape. Much of what results in the end starts with the materials I have at that moment. For example, in the last five years or so, I’ve been working with used aluminum pots and pans and various discarded metals we buy from recycling dealers in the city. My team has been making life-sized tree sculptures with them since 2019, and I have started making wall reliefs with them using bamboo as a support structure. I also started to use spray paint during the Covid pandemic as I wanted to see more color in my work.

In terms of what I think about most, I am of course rooted in Cambodia, but I am also a student of art and have learned about and seen a lot of work by great artists who came before, so there will certainly be various influences there. I see myself as a tool for my work and am trying to arrive at something that is visually substantial and somewhere I have not been. Emotion is a big part of it. Perhaps the dichotomy between traditional and contemporary is overstated and may have come about from perceptions about my process, which is often mischaracterized as weaving. In terms of technique, I am using one of the simplest structures—a grid—to build forms. The forms can be abstract and geometric or organic taking seed pods and flowers as inspiration. In the end, for it to be considered successful, the work must have a sense of energy and life.

CNTRFLD. What is your perspective on the support systems available for artists in Cambodia compared to those in international contexts? How have these systems impacted your own career?

SP. Considering the last fifty years of strife Cambodia has been going through, it is hard to expect the country to have support for artists, especially visual artists. Artists know that we need the outside world so that we can survive from our works. Seeing the world outside is also critical for developing a sense of freedom in our minds and openness of perspectives. I am very fortunate to have been a refugee which allowed me opportunities to have another life, to study, and even travel abroad. In Cambodia, I have learned to accept that limitation is just an everyday reality.

CNTRFLD. Your first solo show, Cambodian Metal, with Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong—coinciding with Art Basel HK—features new wall reliefs and glass sculptures that reflect both Cambodia’s everyday cityscape and broader societal conditions. How did this body of work come together, and what themes or shifts does it represent in your evolving practice?

SP. This is the first exhibition where metal plays a central role. The main material is scrap metal from the traders found all over the city who deal with junk metal of all types, including discarded cooking equipment and materials, or metal panels and sidings that have had their valuable parts stripped away. These materials have served their original purpose and were ready for the incinerator. Another new material is glass, which is present in works that I made partly at the CIRVA (the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Centre) in Marseille, France, where I was resident for a total of nine weeks over two years, working with professional glass technicians. Many objects came out of these sessions and two sculptures incorporating glass are in this exhibition.

CNTRFLD. Are there any emerging Cambodian artists whose work excites you? What do you think makes their contributions significant in the current art scene?

SP. There are three artists that are very good: Khvay Samnang, Kim Hak, and Chov Theanly. Their works are very different from one another but all strong in various degrees. What I admire is their commitment to their work, a consistency and labor that sets them apart from other artists of their generation. They all speak of different aspects of what it means to be a Cambodian, but they work in ways that can be regarded as international.

CNTRFLD. Are there particular concepts, collaborations, or material directions you’re excited to explore in the future? What’s currently occupying your thoughts or your studio?

SP. I was taught not to talk about my future thoughts and plans but can say that I have works showing at the Setouchi Triennale, and the High Line in NYC this year. In early 2026, I will be at a residency in Mexico.

CNTRFLD. What advice would you give to young artists, particularly those from Cambodia or other diasporic backgrounds, who are looking to pursue a career in the arts

SP. Some advice I would give to younger artists would be to know who you are and what it will take for you to succeed and work with a sense of responsibility and urgency. Develop your skill and good habits and understand that art requires a lot of patience and sacrifice. And finally, to know that you can stop and do something else at any time.

About the artist.

Sopheap Pich was born in 1971 in Battambang, Cambodia. In 1979, at the fall of the Khmer Rouge, he and his family fled the country, spending several years in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before immigrating to the United States in 1984. He received his BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1995—which included a year at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy, France—followed by an MFA in painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999.

Pich lived in the United States until 2002, when he returned to Cambodia, settling in Phnom Penh where he continues to live and work. This return marked a profound shift in his practice, as he moved from painting to sculpture, grounding his work in materials intimately connected to Cambodian culture and landscape—primarily bamboo, rattan, and metal.

Widely recognised as one of Southeast Asia’s most significant contemporary artists, Pich creates minimalist, often grid-like sculptures and wall reliefs that evoke memory, trauma, and resilience through a quiet, labour-intensive process. His use of humble, locally sourced materials reflects a deep commitment to craft, materiality, and the poetics of form—echoing affinities with Arte Povera and the Japanese Mingei movement. “Materials hold infinite possibilities,” he has said, placing trust in the tactile language of making to explore Cambodia’s complex histories and his own journey through displacement and return.

Pich’s work has been exhibited extensively in Asia, Europe, the United States, and Australia. Notable presentations include solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013), and participation in major international exhibitions such as the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012), the Singapore Biennale (2011), the Asia Pacific Triennale (2009), the Gwangju Biennale (2023), and the Setouchi Triennale (2022, 2025).

He has held several prestigious residencies, including at the Rauschenberg Foundation, Florida (2017), Headlands Center for the Arts, California (2016), and Civitella Ranieri, Italy (2013). He is represented by Tomio Koyama Gallery (Tokyo), Tina Keng Gallery (Taipei), and Axel Vervoordt Gallery (Antwerp/Hong Kong).