EMMANUELLE NHEAN

Emmanuelle Nhean is a Cambodian painter living in France since 1980.

A medical student in Cambodia at the time of the Khmer Rouge takeover, she was forced to flee her home and Phnom Penh.

On the run, she was arrested and deported to a forced labour camp for 4 years in Kampot, in the south of the country. Released, she returned to Phnom Penh and then fled to Thailand. After a few months in a refugee camp, she finally left for France.

Upon her arrival in France, she initially worked as a nurse to be able to live while waiting to resume and finish her medical studies. It was during her free time devoted to painting that she discovered Western painting, moderns, cubists, contemporaries, abstraction…

Following her instincts, she decided to take private painting lessons, then abandoned her plan to become a doctor and entered an art school in Paris.

Since then, at the crossroads between Western and Asian culture, Emmanuelle Nhean has combined the pictorial tradition drawn from the Reamker* with modern and contemporary Western painting, navigating between figuration, abstraction and Khmer art, also developing a practice of other mediums such as tapestry, embroidery, stained glass or watercolor.

Emmanuelle Nhean’s works sometimes seem to delve into the memory of the world, sometimes on her own, bringing to light the dreams of her childhood or the oldest myths. His washes reinforce the sense of mystery and create a kind of magic, seeming to compose successive veils of colour like memories that blur a reality, like secrets just waiting to be revealed.

His work thus questions the very perpetuation of myths, the search for their deep meanings, the teachings and values they convey and invites individual and collective introspection that this search requires.

*Reamker: The Khmer epic poem adapted from the Ramayana