"Fire and Spirit", oil on canvas, by Soeung Vannara. "There is a common belief that people are formed by combining the four basic elements of water, earth, wind and fire. As long as these elements remain joined together, people live. These elements, however, are only borrowed, and they are slowly given back over a lifetime. With the smoke and ash of their death, people return to the separate elements they once were. When people die because of terrible deeds or torture, what happens to their spirits? My painting reflects on these questions.

A

KHMER Rouge commander sits in the lotus position on a rock, his right hand held

in the air in the style of Buddha. Below him, on the ground, three workers kneel

with their hands held reverently in a sampeah, listening to the speech. The figures

are primitively drawn and the detail rough, but the message is clear. The KR have

usurped the role of Buddhism.

On another huge canvas - made of rough, unfinished paper - a different artist has

created a chilling and evocative scene with fine pencil lines. A pile of rubble from

an Angkor-style monument tumbles down the canvas, as headless Buddhas and relics

litter the scene. Above, a Turner-esque clouded sky swirls violently and a shaft

of light illuminates a solitary decapitated stone lion. The scene is loaded with

powerful emotion - unsurprising, as it was drawn by an artist who himself was orphaned

during the KR years.

While many of Phnom Penh's intellectuals, commentators, politicians, and people on

the street are busying themselves with news and rumors about the impending KR trial,

a small local gallery is tackling the legacy of the KR through previously unexplored

channels, with a thought-provoking and unsettling exhibition, "The Legacy of

Absence."

"We did not originally plan that this exhibition would be on at the same time

as the trial," says show co-curator Ly Daravuth.

"All the talk of trials just concentrates on the logistics of putting one on,"

says Ingrid Muan, the show's other co-curator. "But this is a much more accessible

thing, it's about emotions and feelings and personal experience."

The show will display the works of 11 artists, ten Khmer and one from the Netherlands,

and comprises part of a much larger worldwide exhibition on the same themes. American

art lover and entrepreneur Clifford Chanin, of the Legacy Project, has put together

a series of works of art from places as wide-ranging as Germany, Israel, Japan, China,

Bosnia, the former Soviet Union and India-Pakistan. All the exhibiting countries

have one thing in common - they have suffered a mass trauma or genocide which has

left a great "absence" among the populace. The idea of the exhibition is

to try to understand the kinds of things that are missing after a mass murder or

war, and to explore whether there is a way to fill the emptiness that the victims

leave behind, according to Chanin.

"I am particularly interested in the work of artists because they are often

the first people willing to look at these hard subjects, and think about the ways

in which their works can honor or remember the people who are no longer present,"

he says in an introductory statement.

"The division of the country (1978)", by Svay Ken. from his series of 14 paintings which depict the experiences of his family during Pol Pot's time. This picture shows the division of the country which resulted when the Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia, telling the Khmer people to enter the cities, while Pol Pot's men told the people to go into the forests with them. These paintings are meant to serve as "Records - in particular for future generations - of the time when the people of Phnom Penh were forced into the countryside under the Pol Pot regime.

But the organizers had a shock when they approached Cambodia for entrants, for there

is very little that has been explored in the art world here on the theme of the KR.

Only Vann Nath, who painted the infamous scenes of the Khmer Rouge in Toul Sleng,

and Svay Ken, a local artist who has painted many scenes of the recent past "so

my grandchildren know what I went through," have any kind of body of work on

the theme. Both are displaying work in the "Legacy" exhibition.

Certainly, the policy of the KR to systematically eliminate intellectuals, writers

and artists provides one reason why there is a paucity of original art today. But

Daravuth has a further, more considered reason why Cambodia has not explored the

KR regime through art.

"The only art works you see on display are the mass-produced paintings of Angkor,"

he says. "When you talk to the men who produce them, they say they only want

to produce beautiful things, that it must be beautiful above all."

Daravuth's view is that the absence of a body of work exploring the KR regime is

almost as powerful a statement as if the work had been created in droves. "The

people refuse to confront it so far, the artists do not want to contemplate it. Sometimes

when you have a shock, you don't want to talk for a while," he said. "They

just want to look back with nostalgia and create these Angkor paintings."

Muan, whose mother was living in Germany during the Second World War, says that it

also took a while before any significant World War II art appeared there.

"There was total amnesia there for twenty years," she said.

For the curators, though, it is up to the younger generation to safeguard the legacy

of the Khmer Rouge years.

"I am slightly afraid that it is becoming mythologized, that the personal experiences

are being lost to a more general idea of what happened during those years,"

says Darvuth. "Just the other day I was talking to a 20-year-old who had no

idea what the KR sandals [made from rubber tires] looked like. I found it amazing

- just twenty years on, the younger generation are already forgetting."

Many of the paintings in the exhibition have a general feel rather than being painted

from personal experience, but this is something that will change over time, the curators

say, as the artists become more confident.

"It's a first step," says Muan. "They are now understanding for the

first time that it is okay to paint and discuss these things. As they get more confident

more personal work will be created."

"How do we deal with this heritage?" asks Daravuth, who himself admits

that even though he lived through the KR years, he cannot get a full, coherent grasp

on what happened to him. "With heritage like Angkor Wat, you have conservationists,

the picture painters, and so on. But with the KR regime, you can't classify it as

a UNESCO world monument - there's nothing there. You have to find another way."

The exhibition, which begins January 11, will run for one month at Reyum Gallery

(formerly Situations), Street 178, in Phnom Penh.