Desire at La Paix

Hotel de la Paix’s director of sales and marketing Christian de Boer is promoting the hotel’s next art exhibition well before it’s due to happen, probably because the hotel has landed a “biggie”. On April 10, the hotel’s Arts Lounge will unveil Desire, a “hotly anticipated” exhibition of 12 new artworks by Parisian expat/Cambodian artist Texte de Sera.

Christian’s press release explained: “Stylistically indebted to abstract expressionism, de Sera’s latest work combines the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools.”

De Sera teaches art at the Sorbonne and is also a comic book artist. His last solo exhibition was at the East-by-East gallery in Paris in 2008.

Kiddy tunes

Wat Bo Primary School, the biggest public school in Cambodia with about 4,770 children, is hosting a music festival tomorrow, March 20.

There will be two sessions on Saturday, in the morning and in the afternoon. In all, 2,400 kids from 88 classes will perform in each session, with the highlights being a performance by a massive kids’ band of 80 students. The sixth grade kids will also present a short play in both sessions.

Chigusa Tanaka , an assistant to the director at the school, said more than 80 teachers have been teaching music for three years.

“Before I came here, there were no teachers who could teach music,” she said. “But since then the teachers have been trying so hard.”

Festival session times are 7.20-11am and 1.20-5pm.

Cox return

High profile orphanage founder Geraldine Cox has made good on her “threat” to return to Siem Reap following a breast cancer operation in Australia last year. She was here briefly over the weekend to be interviewed by an Australian television network crew for a current affairs program segment to be aired shortly.

In 2000, a documentary about Geraldine, called My Khmer Heart, won the Documentary of the Year Award at the Hollywood Film Festival.