Art for Kep & James Speck: Where the Mississippi Meets the Mekong

James Speck built a career out of being early to new mediums. Now, a month into a residency at Knai Bang Chatt, he's writing a piece of music that puts the Mississippi and the Mekong in the same room.

James Speck

He introduces himself the way people do when they've told the story a hundred times and are a little bored of the short version: American, animator and art director by trade, fifteen years in Phnom Penh, Singapore before that. Before Singapore there was Los Angeles, and Montreal, and a stretch in the early 1980s when computer animation was still a novelty act. “The first time I did it, it really blew my mind,” he says. He'd figured he would end up doing illustration, or watercolour, something for print. Instead he stuck with the screen.

That stuck-with-it turned into a fairly big career. Hollywood productions. A posting to Singapore with a Montreal software company. An Asian Television Award for a real-time virtual talking character he built for MTV Asia, broadcast in four languages to something like a billion people across China and India — a number he still says with a bit of disbelief. The project also got him to Stockholm, for the European Music Awards, where he did the music as well as the animation.

When he was ready to leave Singapore, he could have gone anywhere. Indonesia was the obvious pull — he'd lived there, learned the language — but Jakarta is sinking and polluted, and Bali, he says, is full of expats doing their twenty years in Hong Kong or Bangkok and then retiring to a beach chair. “That wasn't my thing.” He'd been coming to Cambodia as a tourist for years by then. The plan was two years, maybe three. That was almost sixteen years ago.

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