Cambodia’s Swinging Sixties: Architecture, The Arts, and a Lost Society
Stephen Simmons
Silkworm Books: 2025
.
Cambodia remains a haunted land: its gene pool depleted by the murderous Khmer Rouge regime; its economy still based largely upon garment manufacture, tourism, and agriculture; its governing institutions hobbled by corruption. Almost obliterated was an entire class of the educated, the skilled, and the artistic, as the cities were emptied and their residents sent out to the rice fields and the killing fields. Between 1975 to 1979, Cambodia lost a quarter of its population. Although the figure has since rebounded, the country remains a poor one, hampered by the lack of skills and inadequate infrastructure.

Art and culture had flourished throughout Cambodia’s history—its apogee, of course, being the temples built across the vast Angkor plain—encompassing murals, stone carving, lacquerware, weaving and textiles, silversmithing, ceramics, dance, theatre, and literature. During the ninety years of French colonialism, Cambodia’s arts passed through a French filter. Education for young people at French institutions, both in Cambodia and France, opened the culture to the dizzying changes taking place in all aspects of art in Europe and fused them with old Khmer artistic traditions.

• Tags: Cambodia, Issue 41, Kenneth Barrett, Stephen Simmons