Sopheak Sam សំសុភ័ក្ត្រ (b. Khao-I-Dang, Thailand)
distills affect from postwar intimacies through a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting/drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and visual ethnography. Grounded in image-making and critical theory, their process draws on historic and aesthetic materiality to problematize temporality from memorialized pasts. Tracing the ways in which queer spectrality resurfaces in Khmer subjecthood, their sensuous and spatial interventions are an attempt to destabilize time/space and renegotiate diasporic belonging.
Sam is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art at Cornell University and a graduate student affiliate of the Southeast Asia Program, where they are a 2024-‘25 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Khmer. They are 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 visual modernity.
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).
Pronouns: he/they/she
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Images
Khao-I-Dang Holding Center, Aranyaprathet, Sa Kaeo, Thailand. Personal archives, 1991-92. Courtesy of the artist.
Sam is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art at Cornell University and a graduate student affiliate of the Southeast Asia Program, where they are a 2024-‘25 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Khmer. They are 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 visual modernity.
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).
Pronouns: he/they/she
View CV
Images
Khao-I-Dang Holding Center, Aranyaprathet, Sa Kaeo, Thailand. Personal archives, 1991-92. Courtesy of the artist.
