In creating the first international urban art gallery in Phnom Penh, Tony Francis is trying to jumpstart the street art movement – and put it on the global radar. For years, Cambodia’s urban arts scene has been slowly percolating – and it has been doing so without the help of Tony Francis. With established artists like FONKI, Chifumi, Peap Tarr and Theo Vallier – all either Cambodians or foreigners with close ties to the Kingdom – urban art has become more and more visible, on city walls, on clothes and in schools and restaurants. But Francis, a lanky 38-year-old London native who moved to Cambodia two years ago after five years in Thailand, thinks now is the time for it to move to the next level.

That is why he has set up Kbach Gallery – a high-end showroom of the work of international and Cambodian urban artists targeting major art markets – and the soon-to-open Kbach Studio, a more experimental home for urban artists to host events and collaborate. Francis is in essence the facilitator of a scene that already sprouted organically – flying artists in from around the world for projects, connecting muralists to walls and even to equipment like spray cans, and, for a select group of artists, connecting their pieces to international buyers. Francis’ story is in some ways typical of that of many expatriates in Cambodia; he worked a corporate job, mostly in sales, in London, and was both successful and completely disillusioned. “I was caught in the rat-hole like everybody else in the Western world,” he said. He was gifted a plane ticket to Thailand, which ended up changing the trajectory of his life. “I went back to London and I was sitting on the Tube and I thought, ‘I can’t be here anymore. I have to go back to Asia,’” he said. So Francis moved to Bangkok, where he worked as a project manager on “high-end closing projects”, helping clients navigate business environments throughout the region. “I didn’t enjoy making money for other people and I didn’t enjoy selling something I had no belief in,” Francis said, sitting in his office looking down on the work of some of the country’s most celebrated urban artists. “I may have exchanged lots of zeros in my bank account for beautiful art but I couldn’t be happier. I’d do it again tomorrow.” Francis insists that he is not just selling art, but the artists themselves, by connecting buyers to their work and by promoting them locally and globally. FONKI, a Cambodian-Canadian street artist who grew up in Montreal but has been returning to the Kingdom to work on projects for the better part of a decade, is perhaps Francis’s most celebrated client. At an opening party for the gallery in March, two of his pieces sold for $9,000 each, to an English and Danish buyer, respectively. The two finally met after Francis pestered him by email to sit down for a chat earlier this year. When he finally came to the office, FONKI remembers, he thought Francis looked like a CIA officer, with a folder set aside for each artist, including one dossier on him. “In Cambodia you get a lot of people proposing you plans,” Fonki said. “I think it’s about finding the right people with their hearts in the right place. [At the meeting] I said, ‘This guy looks serious. Let’s give him a shot.’” For the opening show at Kbach, FONKI made an acrylic piece called Rebirth that shows a young, smiling Cambodian girl standing among lotus flowers. A flower burns in her hands as a red krama twists around her legs – a common motif among urban artists in Cambodia. For him, the krama’s association with the Khmer Rouge makes it a potent symbol of the need to take back what was destroyed. “I had a discussion with my aunt, and she said, ‘Why do you wear that krama? I don’t like it.’ I understand your pain but the Khmer Rouge took everything from you. From your family, your dignity, a lot of stuff. Don’t let them take a colour or your scarf,” he said. FONKI said the scarf in the painting is intended to resemble a python in some ways, on its way to swallowing the girl up. But for him, it is actually opening up, revealing the girl. “She’s sort of born from it,” he said. “It’s soft but also really intense and that’s what Cambodia is.” FONKI works within the school of “Kbach” street art, in which certain loosely defined but quintessentially Cambodian elements are fused with modern styles. In Khmer, kbach refers specifically to the ornamentation often seen above doorways and on ancient temples. But it also entails certain movements, such as those of Apsara dancers, and is seen as conveying a spiritual power. For Francis, the connective tissue among all the artists he works with is that they incorporate elements of this style. “It all has a distinctly Cambodian feel, whether it’s been painted by a Cambodian, it’s a pic of a Cambodian, or it’s the kind of graffiti style that looks like Sanskrit writing,” he said. While the Cambodian style is mostly about aesthetics, there are also certain parameters within the subject matter. Politics is typically to be avoided, as is violence or anything sexual. David Myers, a young local street artist, says that the older generation – in other words, 25 and above – works within this style but that up-and-coming artists are branching out. “Our work doesn’t have anything that represents Cambodian culture except for the meaning,” he said. “For us, our work represents how we view or respond to society and culture.” Nonetheless, Myers praised the addition of the gallery and studio to the local scene, saying that before, all the artists knew each other but were dispersed. Having one hub has fostered more collaboration. And while Francis’ gallery is focusing mostly on established artists, like Theo Vallier, Bryan Beyung, Oliver Bonnard and others, his goal is to have up-and-coming locals learning from their more experienced peers. For the annual Cambodian Urban Art Festival in December, which Kbach Gallery will sponsor, a range of international talent will be flown in. FONKI, meanwhile, will be in Cambodia for much of next month for a series of events organised by the gallery, including an auction at the Sofitel Hotel. The visits by world-class artists helps to pass on the skills already developed in much of the Western world – a fact FONKI knows all too well from having gone through the learning process himself. “I started in Montreal by seeing graffiti from mentors,” he said. “Street art blew up everywhere around the world and it took a while to come to Cambodia. The youth need to be exposed to start it and to push art with a Cambodian flavour, not some New York style. It comes back to identity mixed with our values and respect.”