Paris, Phnom Penh and Khmer Art: Behind the Student Exhibition, a State Project for the National Museum

In Phnom Penh, Cambodian students are imagining the future of the sanctuary of Khmer art. Behind them lies a century of Franco-Cambodian history—and a project that is only just beginning.

The bats are gone. It is often forgotten, but during the Khmer Rouge years, when the museum was abandoned and its roof partially collapsed, thousands of them had colonized the galleries. The 1980 inventory reveals entire collections had disappeared. What remains—the Vishnus, the Shivas, the 7th-century lintels—survived as much by accident as by miracle.

It is in this very building, with this very memory, that around a hundred Cambodian students have worked on the future.

Youth Visions for the National Museum Extension, on view until September 11, is not an exhibition like the others. It brings together creative proposals from students from four universities—the Royal University of Fine Arts, Limkokwing, Norton, NPIC—invited to imagine what the world’s largest sanctuary of Khmer art could become once expanded, modernized, rethought. Models, architectural renderings, spatial projections: the young Cambodian generation facing the foundational monument of its cultural identity.

The exercise is less academic than it seems.

A museum under pressure

290,000 visitors in 2024. Around 170,000 Cambodians, 120,000 foreigners—a level of attendance that has long exceeded what the four galleries of the original building can reasonably accommodate. The rooms are too narrow for school groups. Storage space is insufficient. Air conditioning, security systems, multilingual signage: everything shows its age. The museum is magnificent—and it is suffocating.

It is not for lack of attention. In 2013, a first renovation modernized the lighting and security systems. But renovating is not expanding. And the project now taking shape is of a different nature: it involves rethinking the whole—exhibition spaces, visitor pathways, the relationship with the neighborhood, the place of the museum in the city. An intellectual project before it is an architectural one.

This is precisely where Youth Visions comes in.

Giving the problem to the youngest

The idea, jointly led by the National Museum, the Royal University of Fine Arts, and the Franco-Cambodian project teams, is both simple and bold: present students with the real constraints of the site—land footprint, heritage restrictions, functional needs—and see what they do with them. Not a style competition. A creative consultation connected to a real decision-making process.

The Royal University of Fine Arts is not just any partner in this story. Its campus has physically bordered the museum for decades. Its origins date back to the School of Cambodian Arts founded in 1918 by Groslier himself—two years before the museum’s inauguration. The two institutions were born from the same man, from the same conviction that Khmer art deserved both a home and a school. That they are reunited a hundred years later around the question of the building’s future has something of a closed loop.

Limkokwing, Norton, and NPIC bring a different dimension. These are private universities focused on design, communication, and creative technologies—programs that think about space as much through user experience as through built form. Their students do not share the same references as those from the Fine Arts school. That is precisely what makes the exchange interesting.

Paris, Phnom Penh and the Guimet Museum

To understand why this exhibition exists, one must go back to June 2022. That is when Cambodia’s Minister of Culture, Phoeurng Sackona, formally requested support from Paris for the museum’s rehabilitation. The French response was swift: a letter of intent was signed between the two governments in January 2024, followed by the operational launch of the project in October of the same year. Nearly one million euros committed by Paris, with Expertise France leading the implementation and the Guimet Museum as scientific partner.

The Paris institution has maintained a relationship with Phnom Penh for several decades. In 2025, the two museums brought this partnership to its most visible point: 126 Cambodian objects loaned to Paris for the exhibition Royal Bronzes of Angkor, including the spectacular reclining Vishnu from the West Mebon, transferred to France for study and restoration before returning to Phnom Penh. It is Yannick Lintz, director of the Guimet Museum, who co-chairs with Phoeurng Sackona the Franco-Cambodian Permanent Committee on Heritage—whose fourth meeting last September had precisely as its agenda the progress of the feasibility study.

The discussions are technical. The stakes are political. It is about defining what the world’s leading Khmer art museum will be in twenty years.

Money, timelines, reality

900,000 euros. That is the stated budget for the study phase—architectural diagnosis, collection cataloguing, audience analysis, and the outline of a scientific and cultural program. This is not the construction budget. It is not even yet the budget for a preliminary design. It is the budget to determine what must be done, how, and what it will really cost.

The project officially ends in October 2026. At that point, Cambodian authorities will have a complete roadmap. What comes next—international funding calls, architectural tenders, construction—belongs to another timeline. Probably another decade.

This gap between declared ambition and the real timeline of heritage projects is not a disappointment. It is the nature of the work. Major museum renovations are measured in generations as much as in mandates. What is at stake today in Phnom Penh is the phase where fundamental decisions are made: what size, which collections to highlight, which audiences to prioritize, what relationship with the neighborhood. Choices that commit a century.

September 2026, and after

The exhibition closes on September 11. Three weeks later, Phnom Penh will host the Francophonie Summit—the first summit held in Southeast Asia, a moment of considerable international visibility for Cambodia. The renovated museum, or at least the project for its renovation, will be one of the showcases that cultural diplomacy will want to present to its guests.

Youth Visions is part of this sequence without being its product. The students who worked on their models were probably not thinking about diplomatic timelines. They were thinking about space, light, what it feels like to enter a museum that reflects them.

George Groslier had taken the opposite path. He started from representation—Khmer art, its grandeur, its universality—to build a setting worthy of it. A century later, his Cambodian successors begin with use. With the visitor. With the body in space.

It is not the same architecture. It may be a better one.

Exhibition “Youth Visions for the National Museum Extension,” National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. From June 5 to September 11, 2026. Admission included with museum ticket.