Florent Meng Lechevallier : "La vague irrésolue" au Festival Photo Phnom Penh 2025

The Photo Phnom Penh Festival is hosting this year a striking exhibition by Florent Meng Lechevallier, titled La vague irrésolue – The Mekong Project. Installed at the site of the Cambodia-Vietnam Residencies Route, at Factory Phnom Penh, this photographic series offers a deep and poetic reflection on the Mekong River, this gigantic watercourse in constant mutation.

Born in France in 1982, graduated from the Paris School of Fine Arts and the Geneva University of Art and Design, Florent Meng Lechevallier has been developing for over a decade a body of work combining photography and film, between fiction and documentary. His work questions the intimate links between territories and the communities who live there, exploring in particular the forms of resistance that emerge in the face of ecological and social upheavals.

In La vague irrésolue, the artist focuses on the Mekong, a river with a complex legal identity, crossing six countries with varied relationships to its course. Through the lens of Cambodia and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, his photographs reveal how the riverside populations live in symbiosis with the river: between prayer, exploitation, submission, and the quest for balance.

At a time when a predatory economy threatens this ecosystem, Meng Lechevallier questions the way its inhabitants repay what they take from the river, envisioning with it a communion and a shared future.

This exhibition is part of the Residencies Route grant, a regional artistic program supported by the French Institute of Cambodia, the French Institute of Vietnam, and the French Embassy in Thailand, aimed at promoting exchange between artists and cultures along the Mekong. Through this residency, Meng Lechevallier benefited from varied workplaces and opportunities to meet diverse audiences, enriching his artistic approach nourished by intercultural relations.

La vague irrésolue is an invitation to rethink our relationship with nature and the notion of the rights of non-human entities, a crucial fight in the face of the global ecological crisis. Through photography, Florent Meng Lechevallier urges us to see the river not only as a watercourse but as a living and fragile entity, bearer of memory and hope.

The exhibition is held from November 19 to December 19, 2025, as part of the 16th edition of the Photo Phnom Penh festival, at the heart of the Cambodian capital. A rare opportunity to embrace a work that is both engaged and aesthetic, which makes cultures and major environmental issues dialogue.