History & Exhibition: Vann Nath, beyond the walls of S-21

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Fifteen years after his death, the painter’s canvases are back on the walls in Phnom Penh. Bophana Center is showing them until 11 October, alongside recordings in which Vann Nath speaks about his own work. Admission is free.

*Outside the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh*

The exhibition is called “Vann Nath: Paintings of Memory”. It opened on 11 September at the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center and runs until 11 October.

Every canvas on show has come from within Cambodia. Some belong to the painter’s family. Others were lent by friends and private collectors, and several had not been seen in public for years. Bophana has drawn on its own holdings to accompany them: filmed interviews, sound recordings, sequences in which Vann Nath talks about his painting and about what he wanted it to do.

A sign painter from Battambang

Vann Nath was born in 1946 in Battambang province, into a poor family that sold rice noodles. He grew up at Wat Sopee pagoda, where he watched painters decorate the walls and learned the trade by copying them. Before 1975 he made his living painting signs.

On 17 April 1975 the Khmer Rouge entered Battambang. Vann Nath and his family were marched out to Norea commune, a few kilometres away, and put to work in the rice fields. They stayed there close to three years. He was arrested on 29 December 1977. In the first days of January 1978 he arrived at S-21, the security prison installed in a former Phnom Penh school, today the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

He was photographed on arrival, then shackled in Building D and left to starve. Weeks later the guards discovered that he could paint. He was moved to the workshop and set to producing portraits of Pol Pot. That is what saved him. He was among the very few adults who walked out of S-21 alive, in January 1979. Only afterwards did he learn that his children had died while he was inside.

Canvases that became evidence

In the 1980s Vann Nath began to paint what he had seen. Prisoner transfers. Cells. Interrogations. The detail is exact, down to the iron bed frames and the position of the restraints. Those canvases hang at Tuol Sleng, and visitors still stop in front of them.

They also served as evidence. His written account, A Cambodian Prison Portrait, appeared in 1998 and remained for years the only record of S-21 left by a survivor. In 2003 he appeared in Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, where he confronted his former guards on camera and listened to them describe themselves as victims. In 2009 he testified before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, at the trial of Duch, the man who had run the prison. He died in Phnom Penh on 5 September 2011, aged 65.

The other half of the work

This is where “Paintings of Memory” parts company with the familiar image. The hang is not confined to the prison canvases. It also takes in portraits, landscapes and scenes of ordinary Cambodian life.

Vann Nath did not spend thirty years painting the dark. He painted faces, water, trees, people at work in the fields he had once been sent to. The exhibition makes the case that he was a painter before he was a witness, and went on being one afterwards.

The archive recordings give the rooms an unusual quality. A visitor stands in front of a canvas while the painter’s voice, taped in his lifetime, explains what he was after. The artist annotates his own work, fifteen years after his death.

Bophana, gathering the traces

The centre hosting the show was founded in 2006 by the filmmaker Rithy Panh. It carries the name of Hout Bophana, a young woman who died at S-21. Its brief fits in a sentence: collect Cambodia’s images, sounds and films, restore them, and put them within reach of anyone who asks.

That work grows more pressing as the generation who lived through the Khmer Rouge years thins out. Canvases, tapes and film archives are taking over from the witnesses.