Cambodian art
After the collapse of the empire, these and other sites were abandoned and overgrown, allowing much of the era's stone carving and architecture to survive to the present day.
Traditional Cambodian arts and crafts include textiles, non-textile weaving, silversmithing, stone carving, lacquerware, ceramics, wat murals, and kite-making.
The country has experienced a recent artistic revival due to increased support from governments, NGOs, and foreign tourists.
Cambodia's best-known stone carving adorns the temples of Angkor, which are "renowned for the scale, richness and detail of their sculpture".
In the 1960s, art historians Guy and Jacqueline Nafilyan photographed 19th-century murals, providing a record of this lost cultural heritage.
[4] Cambodia's modern silk-weaving centers are Takéo, Battambang, Beanteay Meanchey, Siem Reap and Kampot provinces.
Cambodian silk is generally sold domestically, where it is used in sampot (wrap skirts), furnishings, and pidan (pictorial tapestries), but interest in international trade is increasing.
[8] The height of Cambodian traditional lacquerware was between the 12th and 16th centuries; some examples of work from this era, including gilded Buddha images and betel boxes, have survived to the present day.
Today's revival is still in its infancy, but 100 lacquer artists have been trained by a French expert under the guidance of Artisans d'Angkor, a company that produces traditional crafts in village workshops.
[10] Blacksmithing in Cambodia is essentially linked to the needs of agriculture, and for that reasons, it remains one of the skills which survived best through the tragic years of the Khmer Rouges.
Recently, high-end quality blacksmithing has also emerged in Cambodia producing knives and swords in Khmer and Japanese styles.
Silver was made into a variety of items, including weaponry, coins, ceremonial objects used in funerary and religious rituals, and betel boxes.
[13] During Cambodia's colonial period, artisans at the School of Fine Art produced celebrated silverwork, and by the late 1930s there were more than 600 silversmiths.
[14] In modern Cambodia, the art of glazed ceramics faded into oblivion: the technique of stoneware stop to be used around 14th century, at the end of Angkor era.
Today this technique begin a slow revival through a Belgian ceramist who founded the Khmer Ceramics & Fine Arts Center, in Siem Reap, the organization lead vocational training and researches about this lost skill.
Cambodia's kite-making and kite-flying tradition, which dates back many centuries, was revived in the early 1990s and is now extremely popular throughout the country.
[16] Galleries opened in Phnom Penh during the 1960s, and cultural centers hosted exhibitions of modern paintings and provided art libraries.
Socialist Bloc governments sponsored the education of young art students in Poland, Bulgaria, the former Soviet Union, and Hungary during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Artists generally earn income from Angkor-inspired art for tourists or from painting commercial signs and large reproductions that in the West would be mechanically produced.
Other notable Cambodian artists include Leang Seckon, Pich Sopheap, Svay Ken, Asasax, Chhan Dina, Patrick Samnang Mey, Lam Soeung, and Chhorn Bun Son.
FONKi, born in Paris to Khmer refugee parents and who grew up in Montreal, is a part of diaspora artists who have moved back to Cambodia to develop the local arts scene.
[19] They have also commissioned other artists from countries like Nepal to create custom murals and graffiti and aim to support new Cambodian talent as well as nurturing Phnom Penh’s international reputation as a vibrant cultural hub in South East Asia.
