Cambodia & Book : When Art Refuses to Forget: Soko Phay and the Wounds of the Cambodian Genocide

Published by Éditions Naima in March 2026, "Cambodge, l'art devant l'extrême" is far more than an academic essay. It is an intimate and rigorous journey through fifty years of creation in the face of the unthinkable.

A World Swallowed Whole

April 1975. The Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh. What they set in motion is not merely the extermination of human beings — it is an entire world they seek to erase: its rituals, its images, its archives, down to the very memory that it ever existed. Nearly two million people, close to a quarter of Cambodia's population, would perish between 1975 and 1979, through deportations, mass killings and famine. But Soko Phay, professor of art history and theory at the University of Paris 8, opens her essay with an observation more insidious still: the absence of images. Not simply the absence of witnesses — the absence of traces.

It is from this foundational void that the entire book is built, published in March 2026 by Éditions Naima, with a preface by Richard Rechtman, anthropologist, psychiatrist and director of studies at the EHESS.

Kamtech: To Reduce to Dust

The first chapter opens on a Khmer word: kamtech. Its roots mean "to destroy", "to break", "to reduce" — terms present in everyday usage long before the regime. Under the Khmer Rouge, the word acquires a radical dimension, ceasing to denote simple destruction and becoming instead a technical term for elimination: "to reduce to dust", "to erase all trace", down to the name, the body and the very memory of individuals. Contained within this single word is the ambition of the genocide: not only to kill, but to ensure that no one remains to remember that the killing ever took place.

It is precisely against this erasure that art asserts itself. Through its symbolic resources, creation makes it possible to reveal what was stolen from sight, while carrying out the work of transmitting events that were never inscribed in the official historical record. Reconstituting images is therefore not merely an artistic gesture — it is a precondition for survivors' voices to be heard at all.

Two Generations Confronting Horror

Soko Phay is no outside observer. She is part of the Cambodian diaspora that escaped the Khmer Rouge, arriving as a young refugee in France in 1976. Victim, witness, then scholar: this triple position runs through the entire work, lending it a particular gravity at the border between the personal and the analytical.

The intergenerational dialogue — sustained by the rare words of her parents, who have since returned to live in Cambodia — gives the book a singular depth. It is from this family memory that the encounter with artworks takes shape: those of a first generation of survivor-artists, and those of a second generation that did not live through the events but inherited their weight. Rithy Panh, Vann Nath, Séra, Svay Sareth, and then Davy Chou, Vandy Rattana, Guillaume Suon and Jenny Teng have each, in their own way, made memory their work — resisting denial and the erasure of the dead who were left without graves.

Between these two bodies of work, the differences are not merely stylistic: they concern the fundamental relationship to the event itself. To bear witness to what one lived through, or to restore what one inherited without having seen it. Two postures that Soko Phay examines through the concept of "postmemory", borrowed from American theorist Marianne Hirsch, to show how genocide continues to transmit itself across generations.

A Construction in Many Voices

The book itself is conceived as a score. It layers several registers of reading: intimate accounts in the foreground, artworks and interviews in the middle distance, historical analysis and literary references in the background. This controlled architecture sustains a broad and nuanced prose that renders, with considerable force, the complexity of a shattered world — one in which creation emerges as a gesture of resistance as much as reconstruction.

Far from purely academic frameworks, Soko Phay favours an embodied approach, grounded in fieldwork: returning to the sites of the tragedy, gathering testimony, bringing aesthetic analysis into dialogue with documentary material. One thinks inevitably of Rithy Panh, whose work runs through the book like a red thread — he who had already laid the foundations, in The Elimination (Grasset, 2011), for a reflection on this same obsession with erasure. Soko Phay extends and broadens that thinking to encompass the full landscape of contemporary Cambodian art.

A Memory Still Raw

This ambition — to hold together at once the intimate, the aesthetic and the historical — occasionally exposes the book to the risk of dispersion, as the sheer abundance of material sometimes dilutes the argumentative thread. But that is also the price of a thought in motion, one that refuses frameworks too narrow to capture the fractures of a memory still open.

Fifty years after April 1975, the question this book raises remains urgent: how does a society rebuild itself when someone has tried to strip it of its very images? Soko Phay's answer is unambiguous, and it runs through art — not as consolation or softening of reality, but as necessity. The only way to restore to the unburied dead a presence within collective memory.

In this balance between abundance and rigour, the book stands as a precious contribution — sensitive and exacting in equal measure — to our understanding of the long aftermath of the Cambodian genocide. A book for specialists and for those who encounter Cambodia only from a distance, and who find themselves, by the last page, unable to look away quite as easily as before.

"Cambodge, l'art devant l'extrême", Soko Phay, Éditions Naima, March 2026, 400 pages. Preface by Richard Rechtman.