Information
Biography
សំសុភ័ក្ត្រ Sopheak Sam (b. Khao-I-Dang, Sa Kaeo Province, Thailand) grounds their visual art by de-archiving raw materials from history, mistranslating ornamental forms, and problematizing temporality from memorialized pasts. Tracing affect and intimacies across transient sites of Cambodian diasporic movements, Sam’s work seeks to map the queer spectrality of Khmer refugeehood through their expansive use of mediums ranging from paintings and prints to videos and installations.
Sam is a naturalized U.S. citizen of ethnic Khmer descent and grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts (ancestral homeland of the Pawtucket and Wamesit communities). Sam spent their early childhood in New England in a small apartment with their parents and six siblings. Prior to the Khmer Rouge period, their father’s family were living and working as rice farmers outside of Battambang province while their mother was a homemaker in the cosmopolitan city of Phnom Penh. Their paternal grandmother is Kampuchea Krom and their maternal grandfather was an officer in the Khmer National Armed Forces led by General Lon Nol. Sam’s parents met in Khao-I-Dang refugee camp after escaping the Cambodian genocide and the subsequent Cambodian-Vietnamese conflict.
Sam is currently pursuing their M.F.A. in visual arts at Cornell University, where they’re an affiliate of the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP). They are particularly engaged in fields of inter-Asia knowledge production and poststructural ontologies of queer affect through a transnational lens. Their research intersects cultural and media studies, queer studies, anthropology of Cambodia and Thailand, critical diaspora studies, Asian-American studies, and Buddhist modernity.
Fulbright
From 2022 to 2023, Sam lived and worked in Thailand as a U.S. Fulbright Student Researcher affiliated with the Department of Media Arts and Design at Chiang Mai University ↗. Through cross-disciplinary methodologies, Sam examined the politics of belonging in kantreum musical arts in Surin province (and Lower Isan), along the Thai-Cambodian border. Positing kantreum as an enduring intermediary of cultural past and present, they observed its trajectory renegotiating identity claims within contentious spaces of citizenship, heritage, and language rights. Sam’s focus on kantreum and Northern Khmer indigeneity is part of their longstanding research in legacies of cultural labor, nation-building, war and refuge, border conflict, hegemonic notions and constructions of “authenticity”, identity politics and re-conceptualizations of memory and counter-memory in Southeast Asian contemporaneity.
They hope to share their learnings and experiences from this period through an open-source publication sometime in the near future.
Pronouns: he/they/she
Images
Khao-I-Dang Holding Center, Aranyaprathet, Sa Kaeo, Thailand. Personal archives, 1991-92. Courtesy of the artist.
Photo of artist by MAIIAM Chiang Mai staff holding a papier-mâché vase by Thai artist Mit Jai Inn (2023)
សំសុភ័ក្ត្រ Sopheak Sam (b. Khao-I-Dang, Sa Kaeo Province, Thailand) grounds their visual art by de-archiving raw materials from history, mistranslating ornamental forms, and problematizing temporality from memorialized pasts. Tracing affect and intimacies across transient sites of Cambodian diasporic movements, Sam’s work seeks to map the queer spectrality of Khmer refugeehood through their expansive use of mediums ranging from paintings and prints to videos and installations.
Sam is a naturalized U.S. citizen of ethnic Khmer descent and grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts (ancestral homeland of the Pawtucket and Wamesit communities). Sam spent their early childhood in New England in a small apartment with their parents and six siblings. Prior to the Khmer Rouge period, their father’s family were living and working as rice farmers outside of Battambang province while their mother was a homemaker in the cosmopolitan city of Phnom Penh. Their paternal grandmother is Kampuchea Krom and their maternal grandfather was an officer in the Khmer National Armed Forces led by General Lon Nol. Sam’s parents met in Khao-I-Dang refugee camp after escaping the Cambodian genocide and the subsequent Cambodian-Vietnamese conflict.
Sam is currently pursuing their M.F.A. in visual arts at Cornell University, where they’re an affiliate of the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP). They are particularly engaged in fields of inter-Asia knowledge production and poststructural ontologies of queer affect through a transnational lens. Their research intersects cultural and media studies, queer studies, anthropology of Cambodia and Thailand, critical diaspora studies, Asian-American studies, and Buddhist modernity.
Fulbright
From 2022 to 2023, Sam lived and worked in Thailand as a U.S. Fulbright Student Researcher affiliated with the Department of Media Arts and Design at Chiang Mai University ↗. Through cross-disciplinary methodologies, Sam examined the politics of belonging in kantreum musical arts in Surin province (and Lower Isan), along the Thai-Cambodian border. Positing kantreum as an enduring intermediary of cultural past and present, they observed its trajectory renegotiating identity claims within contentious spaces of citizenship, heritage, and language rights. Sam’s focus on kantreum and Northern Khmer indigeneity is part of their longstanding research in legacies of cultural labor, nation-building, war and refuge, border conflict, hegemonic notions and constructions of “authenticity”, identity politics and re-conceptualizations of memory and counter-memory in Southeast Asian contemporaneity.
They hope to share their learnings and experiences from this period through an open-source publication sometime in the near future.
Pronouns: he/they/she
Images
Khao-I-Dang Holding Center, Aranyaprathet, Sa Kaeo, Thailand. Personal archives, 1991-92. Courtesy of the artist.
Photo of artist by MAIIAM Chiang Mai staff holding a papier-mâché vase by Thai artist Mit Jai Inn (2023)
