For Immediate Release
Pteah Chas x Sâmleng opens Sopheak Sam’s first solo exhibition in CambodiaOpening June 5 at Pteah Chas’s Shophouse Studio Art Gallery, the exhibition features a room-scale installation with new works exploring queer desire and distance during Pride Month.
Sopheak Sam: Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?
Exhibition Dates: June 5 – July 5, 2026
Public Reception: Friday, June 5, 6-9:00pm (with performance by Jean-Baptise Phou)
(Phnom Penh, May 29, 2026) This June, Shophouse Studio at Pteah Chas presents Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, the first solo exhibition in Phnom Penh by Cambodian American artist and Sâmleng resident Sopheak Sam (b. Khao-I-Dang, Thai-Cambodian border). Featuring new works produced during Sam’s month-long residency with Sâmleng, the exhibition explores desire, distance, skinship, racial melancholia, and the layered complexities of queer Asian subjectivity across diaspora and postwar memory.
Founded by Cambodian-French artist and filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Phou, Sâmleng supports contemporary artistic practices that amplify Cambodian voices and transnational cultural exchange. During the public opening reception on June 5, Phou will present a preview performance of Out of My Skin, ahead of its forthcoming premiere at Institut français du Cambodge (IFC).
Working across installation, painting, textile, and sculptural assemblage, Sam transforms the rooftop gallery into an immersive environment of freestanding mixed-media paintings viewed in the round alongside hanging tapestries and video. Motifs drawn from vernacular architecture, devotional ornamentation, serpent iconography, camouflage, and fragmented archives reveal and conceal across layered surfaces of fabric, wood, brick, and canvas.
Coinciding with Cambodian Pride Month, Do You Really Want To Hurt Me meditates on the figure of the snake as both wound and possibility: a body in perpetual transformation, renewal, and becoming. Across the exhibition, snakeskin emerges as a recurring material and metaphorical trace — a shedding of former selves that gestures toward impermanence, transience, and the afterlife of displacement.
Drawing from Boreth Ly’s invocation of the snakebite as both poison and cure in Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (University of Hawai'i Press, 2020), the exhibition considers how images conjure pain and pleasure simultaneously, transforming injury into a site of sensuous and psychic reconstitution. Borrowing from concepts of “Buddhist melancholia” articulated by Arnika Fuhrmann and “racial melancholia” theorized by David L. Eng, Sam considers how phantom bodies, unresolved grief, and inherited histories continue to inhabit contemporary queer Cambodian life. Rather than seeking closure, the works linger within states of suspended intimacy and uncertainty, where desire, memory, and loss circulate through bodies still in the process of shedding their skin.
Do You Really Want To Hurt Me extends Sam’s ongoing exploration of postwar affect, material memory, and queer Asian subjectivity, foregrounding the unstable entanglements between pleasure, melancholia, and survival.
Artist Biography
Sopheak Sam (b. Khao-I-Dang, Thai-Cambodia border) is a Khmer American artist and researcher currently based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Sam’s sensuous and spatial interventions distill postwar intimacies to trace the afterlives of refugeehood. Their expansive practice takes shape as room-scale, mixed media installations that grapple with fragmentary memories, histories, and geographies.
Sam is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant (2026), Artadia Award (2025), U.S. Fulbright Research Fellowship (2022-23), Cornell Council for the Arts Grant (2024), and Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship (2017), among others. Their art has been exhibited nationally across the U.S. and internationally in the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia. Their research inquiry reframes how we might view queer/Asian/diaspora within multiple entangled intellectual genealogies, political formations, and relational socialities.
Sam is the second-youngest of nine children born to Cambodian refugees who emigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, where they grew up. Sam received their Master of Fine Arts from the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and was a graduate affiliate of the Southeast Asia Program.
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Press Contacts
Sopheak Sam, Artist
Email: zopheak@gmail.com
Telegram: @sopheaksamart
Chansopheak Hem, Founder and Managing Director at Pteah Chas
Telegram: @hemchansopheak
+855 16 333 287
Hugo Hamon, Project Manager at Sâmleng
Telegram: @hugohamon
+855 96 937 5159
Supported by
Sopheak Sam: Do You Really Want To Hurt Me is generously supported by Sâmleng, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an anonymous donor.