From 6 to 30 August 2026, The Gallerist on Street 240 in Phnom Penh is hosting Neighbour, a solo exhibition by Cambodian painter Thun Dina. Through a new series of oil and acrylic canvases, the artist looks back on his childhood spent along the Mekong River, and on the upheavals that have since reshaped its banks and the lives of those who call them home.

In the Phnom Penh of Cambodia's musical golden age, Meas Samon stood out in a register all his own: comic, satirical song. A notable figure on the Khmer rock and psychedelic scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was one of the few artists of his generation to make audiences laugh while slipping in a genuine critical eye on Cambodian society. His career, like that of so many musicians of the era, would be brutally cut short by the Khmer Rouge.

Never point your feet at a monk, count a gecko's calls to learn your romantic fate, or change your name to throw a restless spirit off your trail: in Cambodia, a set of popular beliefs still quietly shapes small everyday gestures. Some stem from Buddhist etiquette, others from an older folklore that predates Buddhism's arrival altogether. A look at eight of them, as documented by researchers, teachers, and Cambodians themselves.

In Phnom Penh, life slows down around the Olympic Stadium. The Cambodian Pétanque and Boules Federation gathers its devotees on its own courts, in the shade of tall trees, amid the click of metal balls and the smell of sun-warmed gravel.

Spared for his talent as a painter, Bou Meng survived S-21 by putting brush to canvas for his own captors. A portrait of one of the last seven known adult survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime's deadliest prison.

Seven medals in Mongolia and the right to host the 2028 edition: Cambodia confirms its rising profile on the Asian ITF Taekwon-Do scene.

There's a song where she owns being 31 and single, and so what? In 1960s Cambodia, that simply wasn't done. Pen Ran sang it anyway. Between psychedelic rock, cha-cha-cha and near-constant controversy, here's a look back at the meteoric career of a Cambodian singer whose disappearance under the Khmer Rouge remains, to this day, wrapped in unanswered questions.

Across the river from the Royal Palace, on the bank where the Mekong, the Tonlé Sap and the Bassac meet, Cham and Vietnamese families have lived on their boats for generations. As Phnom Penh raises glass towers all around them, all they have left for an address is a mooring spot — temporary, and always under threat.

Prime Minister in 1945, and again in 1972: on paper, Son Ngoc Thanh's career looks like a political summit. In practice, he never held power for more than a few weeks at a stretch, caught between his open admiration for imperial Japan, a later alliance with the CIA, and a lifelong, structuring hostility toward Norodom Sihanouk. A portrait of a Khmer nationalist as consequential as he is uncomfortable to celebrate without nuance.

For nearly a century, an ochre Art Deco dome has watched over Phnom Penh and over one of the most photographed markets in Southeast Asia — born from a drained swamp, scarred by bombs, and saved just in time by a French-Cambodian renovation.

Bernard has sung the same Khmer song at the same karaoke bar for three years. He still doesn't understand a single word of it. In his own eyes, he's a local star — a title that, in his mind, now sits right alongside King of the Bar Stool.

Régis spent twenty years bouncing between unemployment and odd jobs in the South of France. At forty-three, he lands in Cambodia and becomes, somewhere over the course of a Paris-Phnom Penh flight, an "international development strategy expert." His accent, for its part, made the trip without losing a single syllable — and has, if anything, gotten considerably thicker since.

Bernard arrived in Cambodia eight years ago. He never left. Neither did his belly. Bernard orders his Anchor at 4pm sharp, knows every bartender's name going back to 2018, and for the past six months, he's even found love. Well, a version of love. And you hear him before you see him.

Somewhere on the dripping slopes of Mount Samkos, in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains, a flower pushes up through the leaf litter with no stem to announce it. It has no leaves, no visible roots, no chlorophyll. It lives for only a few days, grows nowhere else on Earth, and for more than sixty years the scientific world believed it had vanished. This is the story of Sapria poilanei, one of Cambodia's rarest and least-known plants.

Sabine preaches happy simplicity to 47,000 followers from her lovely condo with shared pool. She has a cleaning lady and only ever travels by air-conditioned taxi. She calls it "living with less."

From TikTok fit-checks to the runways of Rosewood Phnom Penh, a new generation of Cambodians is rewriting what it means to dress Khmer. Between streetwear, sustainability and a fierce attachment to heritage, young Cambodians are turning fashion into a language of identity — and the country's creative scene is finally catching up.

Gilbert has never received a single invitation card in ten years. Yet he attends every diplomatic reception in Phnom Penh, without exception, with the reliability of a conscientious civil servant — except nobody ever hired him for the job. Nobody quite knows how he gets in. He himself never tells it the same way twice.

July 1942: a professor of Pali is arrested, without even his religious superiors being warned. He doesn't know it yet, but he has just set off the first major anti-colonial demonstration in modern Cambodian history. Dead in detention a year later, Achar Hem Chieu would go on to become a reference that generations of Cambodians would keep invoking — sometimes for causes that sit uneasily together.

Brandon booked his flight on a Thursday night, somewhere between his second glass of white wine and a documentary about street children in Phnom Penh. By Friday morning he'd already ordered the polo shirt. Eight days later he comes home changed for life — just not quite the way he thinks.

November 1911. A steamship, the Armand-Béhic, glides up the brown waters of the Saigon River and docks in the sticky heat of the coming dry season. Down the gangway steps a thirty-nine-year-old man, a lawyer by training and a journalist by temperament, arriving to take charge of one of the largest and most coveted territories in the French colonial empire. His name is Albert Sarraut.

Since its official inauguration on October 25, 2025, the SM Art Center has established itself as one of the most ambitious cultural spaces ever created in Cambodia. Located in Krosang village, Chreav commune, just outside Siem Reap's tourist core, the center presents itself as Cambodia's first contemporary art center and museum devoted entirely to modern Cambodian creation.v

There is a new creature at the vernissage, and it has evolved with alarming speed. It wears linen the way a hermit crab wears a shell — for protection, and because it looks fantastic in photos.

Beneath the stalactites of Laang Spean, in Battambang province, archaeologists have spent more than sixty years digging through a memory that stretches back several millennia. What the earth reveals there upends the idea of a fixed Khmer identity: Cambodia's first inhabitants did not all spring from the same soil. They arrived in successive waves, from the forests of Sundaland, the rice fields of southern China, and eventually the shores of India.

Long before Jayavarman II proclaimed Cambodia's independence on Mount Kulen in 802 and laid the first stone of the Khmer Empire, the Mekong Delta and surrounding plains had already given rise to powerful kingdoms, largely forgotten by the general public today. Funan, then Chenla, spent nearly seven centuries shaping the political, religious, and commercial foundations on which Angkor would later rise.