Sopheap Pich's Bamboo and Rattan Explorations | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 42

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor [Music] sopia pitch is one of Cambodia's most exciting and internationally recognized artists his signature rattan and bamboo sculptures are shaping the Southeast Asian contemporary art world sup hips someone who's so clear about his process and his reason for being an artist a lot of visibles are so incredibly touchable because of the envelope chess forms i think that comes back to this idea this very intellectualized exercise of trying to tap into something that's very natural and deeper than us and that's our connection to the material connection to the earth and the connection to the things that make us who we are there must be a world that I can live in there must be a little place for me that's always been my aspiration to find that little world [Music] so pip was born in a small village near baton bang Cambodia in 1971 it was here where he learnt the traditional metalsmith methods passed on by his father techniques that are so embedded in his work today my father always taught me have you hungry you got to go and find food so it teach me to make my own fishhook put a worm on it and actly caught caught my first fish with it so he was pretty proud of me sopia later adapted his father's traditional craftsman skills into mesmerizing objects in 2002 he sculpted mountain spring a form that alludes to a khmer fishing trap so this shapes our reminiscence of things from maybe my childhood like if you go around the countryside you see people putting a sort of haystacks it has the shape this kind of mountain shape I also people make fish trap that at all they usually have openings here they put a bait inside and then fish swim into it and he cannot come out you really wanted to make work that reflected his own experience in Cambodia amusing local techniques which he learned from his father as a boy so making fish traps weaving baskets all those who perhaps childhood was spent playing with marbles and fish traps he grew up during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge which claimed the lives of nearly 2 million people my father had no hope that the country is gonna get any better the only way to have a better life in his mind was to get us to a place where he can have you know proper education so he was willing to risk everything for that his mother carried his younger brother on her back and his father held his hand as they crossed the border to Thailand these memories later found their ways into his installation titled 1979 it was almost his post-apocalyptic colored landscape so there were things that were left behind like binoculars there was bomb casings the Buffaloes that were in the field so all these are kind of scattered around the room for him as a child they were very strange and so in insulation he produced them at such a large exaggerated scale as what a child see them at the end of the installation was his first Buddha piece it was inspired by a temple what's significant about the temple was that all inside the wall it was like red spots everywhere I figured that maybe people was killed in the temple and it was blood so to symbolize that I make my foot odor it's a really beautiful minimalist Buddha but sopia has left the strands dangling towards the bottom and the ends of the rattan are actually tipped in red to suggest blood leaving the violence behind him so he arrived at Cowie dong a refugee camp in Thailand it was here around 12 years old where he had his first encounter with art he was mesmerised by a watercolor painting of a typical cambodian landscape drawn by a child you know when you see something that beautiful for the first time in your life it just have a an imprint on your memory so pip emigrated to the u.s. in 1984 the world of art quickly faded out of sippy eps life when his father decided that medicine would be his calling being the elder son my father expected a lot out of me he just figure you know my son is gonna pay me back in some manner or other and that was not to be an artist but so perhaps medical career was short-lived in 1991 he enrolled in painting at the University of Massachusetts breaking traditions to follow his dreams being sort of an outsider he didn't have many friends and know how to make many friends odd was a kind of escape from the real world and I know that that's what I was gonna do no matter what so perhaps early paintings expressed his memories of his country and the politics of that time he painted portraits of the prisoners at Tuol Sleng prison the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime I draw it with just a bamboo pen and a brush and India ink leaving behind a country suffering from violence and injustice was something that deeply affected him it was almost just trying to pull something out of myself so that you know I didn't have to deal with him you know in the long runs subsequently I move out of that personal stage and I became somebody else and so in 2004 superb looked for inspiration elsewhere his medical school lessons with an ax a butcher's knife and his old textbooks he embarked on his first ever sculpture a pair of lungs I just look at the medical look and started making drawings based on these inside forms you know the stomach the liver the lungs I just started making a frame of a pair of lungs because I was smoking a lot the director of the French cultural center at that time told him that the world has a beautiful austerity is very modern in its form and it was when the artist took this advice that his signature style was born his experiments were the piece of rattan and a knife accidentally led to the start of his international art career my very first sculpture silence and then my second sculpture which is cycle those two work defines who I am as a person they have dictated the way I will get with since I made them since I was a child it was always the hunger was always a demon you know the beasts they suggest a circular kind of motion and I start thinking about you know a family connection cycle of hunger to be the sound of a cliche ish yeah a lot of my work has to do with duality there's always a kind of two thing connecting to each other suburbs early sculptures were representations of internal organs so they were clearly influenced by his pre-med studies in the US but also I think a way of thinking about human experience human connection the relationship between inside and outside so perhaps experimental methods and the ability to make these subtle connections is what makes his art so unique coming up next we show you how his bamboo sculptures go from tree to heart yes [Music] sopia pitch is most known for his organic geometrical structures his work explores cycles and connections drawing from his memories of childhood during the Khmer Rouge his search for belonging in the US and even his medical school books in 2002 Sapir returned back to Cambodia to / Phnom Penh a city he'd never been to before I fell in love with it my census was just just exploding they smell the building I smelled the dirt I smelled the air and everything about it was just delicious since moving back to Cambodia so pubes art began to reflect his hybrid identity his 2008 sculptured jewel explores the connections and collision of his two worlds the idea of duality there's so many layers to it uh being someone that was born here and you know going somewhere else coming back I guess you're always kind of walking into different worlds it was this sculpture that set his principle of non wastage a practice that's intrinsic to his art making jewel was made by using the entire ends of four bamboo trees not throwing anything away but the branches it's not possible to use every single thing but to use the most of the things that you're using I think it's very important Ratan and bamboo grow in the tropics and one of the fastest-growing plants in the world but for sopia there were not only the most accessible and convenient but also the most affordable materials I wasn't born with a lot of money and I didn't start making out with a lot of money so I have to choose the cheaper material it's just simply out of a necessity that we use it it becomes and it looks like choice later on it has be grown to accept it and love it he first worked with Ratan as us as a sculptural material and for him that was a major turning point was a I think for him an intellectual leap and he kind of found what it was that worked for him as an artist do you think about these traditional wicker furniture that we used to have I think those familiar sensations are probably quite contextual for Southeast Asian audiences I was riding my bicycle around and just pretty much across the block from my from where we were living there was a rattan shop so I figured why not just walk in there and ask them to buy a few rattan trees with subpoena leborgne trademark his ethos of non wastage came a new one no cutting corners I think part of making a sculpture is to make everything yourself it's not important that you get it done faster it's not important that it should be easier for severe an important part of making his sculpture is to choose which bamboo or rattan to use he takes us to Chung bak meais where he shows us how he picks his material looking at the bamboo you can see like what is the difference between this bamboo and that bamboo which one do we prefer myself personally I get al inspiration from that for future works like for example at one point you were cutting bamboo and I saw all the shell all the patterns like you know on the on the outside of the bamboo for the first time you know because I'm I'm right there next to it it forced me to look at it for this kind of strenuous work Sapir pro lies on the support of his team it's lonely to work alone yeah and as you get older you don't want to be lifting stuff and cutting stuff this stuff that you don't want to do physically you have other people who are more capable doing it I mean they helped me more than I helped them for sure and so I'm very lucky that I have a solid team so pieps first assistant Tama began working with him at the start of his sculpting career in 2004 i mewn cater towards Ferrara you'd have a gang geek on the bike a leading slack on me in school you mean laughing at you set around a bunch of kids up around climate we're gonna take this one down beat [Applause] hahahaha that is beautiful he is involved in every aspect of the making of the work he's a maker I mean as a sculptor he's very interested in every aspect of the material he can really sense the detail and the human hand in every little element of his sculptures so even when I'm cutting I don't want to mess with I don't want to ruin this so I'm careful I don't want to damage the bamboo and that's the other thing about cutting your bamboo is you can choose you want to save that so you don't want to damage it but you buy bamboo from Depot when they cut this usually they just go like this and then they cut this product well after the bamboo is chopped from the tree the stalk is cut the joints are leveled the pieces are split the strands are shaved and ready to be woven into the sculpture returned and then will are incredibly difficult to work with because he would need to strip down the individual strands and really make the client before he shipped them as so pubes work developed over time his forms became more refined his mid furious installations were very elaborate and quite spectacular his techniques were clearly improving and he was able to work with the materials soapy ups detailed and delicate work raft and compound were inspired by the connections to his environments and shapes around him in 2008 Sapir pond more than 3000 families were evicted from their homes near Bouin kak lake to make room for a development project even in the year 2000 the countryside is full of these war materials you still see skeletons of tanks and helicopters and they go to a factory process recycling whatever and they come back us wires and nails and rebar so there was a connection I made the war material become the building material but then there's also symbolically like a city's build but then old buildings get destroyed this is just kind of issues that were in my mind it was a really powerful avocation of the sense of Urban Development and displacement but also the fact that the city was really just floating on very unstable ground and then he developed that further in the compound installation which was this phenomenal cityscape that filled a room and it was a modular piece as well so the different elements could be reconfigured in different ways that was constantly kind of evolving depending on where it was being shown connecting to his country creating from his land and working with his hands gave Sapir of the freedom that he craved I feel like a butterfly I feel like just I'm flooding around I work 12 hours a day 13 hours a day I mean I was the happiest I've ever been and you know you spend like six weeks making one sculpture obviously that's that's a beautiful kind of freedom immersed in his world of beauty and freedom so P Epps work continues to develop coming up next we take a look that's how he cooks his own paint and we show you submits new groundbreaking paintings is [Music] Cambodia's Sapir pitch bursts onto the international stage with his bamboo and rattan sculptures his childlike imagination and his addiction to crafting is what makes his art stand out amongst his peers just as his technique of processing the material has evolved so has his art keeping to his philosophy of non wastage and using locally sourced materials in 2010 soap Epps started making his grid paintings I was very influenced by artists such as Brancusi for example all these very sort of stark modernist grids but by using rattan by using Hessian burlap bamboo he's working with materials that are found around him I like the grid that it's kind of anybody's technique you know the grid kind of belongs to anybody I don't treat my painting like a like a painting I treat my painting like a sculpture like all my sculpture you can see everything transparency like that way of thinking seemingly from a distance you see it as a solid surface but it's not it's got a lot of holes in it it's you can peer through to the back and stuff like that he uses burlap from his local market to patch over the grids I want the story of how it's made to be part of the world too it's made with this it's made this way he's covered the burlap with earth that he's collected from around the country so it's very much grounded literally in the environment around him so they're a really interesting play on the sense of a minimalist or a geometric abstract painting being kind of non representational into something that's incredibly rich and filled with information about Cambodian life society environment I find out to be a very interesting thing to use things that have a kind of personality you know look at this one here this is pretty cool well look at it it's got character some modern artists cannot even make work this interesting and this is done with no intention of it being interesting you know what people throw away what people don't don't consider important we think it's important sticking by his principles of no shortcuts superb makes his own charcoal paint out of beeswax he travelled to the Ratanakiri province in northern Cambodia to collect this pure raw beeswax I love the smell it's that beautiful sweet smell of honey and just the color you just can't beat it the beeswax is boiled and the charcoal is then mixed into the recipe this is the same charcoal that we cook with it's wood charcoal it's completely natural love this color I've never made a black oil painting I never had any intention to but I can say I love this charcoal and wax mixture his work is very much about a sense of play a sense of discovery and a sense of making pizza maker with the mixture that he has cooked superb then applies it onto the canvas it's a very physical process it's not something you do with a small brush it doesn't feel like painting to me it feels like house painting when it comes to my own work everything is a kind of surprise if I think I've gotten somewhere and I think I've been there before and I haven't progressed further than that I know that work is not done so pupa continues to surprise us with his most recent bamboo strips and natural pigment paintings you can you ask yourself what would happen if you stick a piece of bamboo onto some pain and you put on a piece of paper you say well I don't know so you do it and you find out with his devoted set of tools his bamboo stick a piece of paper and red iron oxide he adds one new ingredient music and lets his trusted bamboo stick do the rest of the work it makes perfect sense to me it refined my way of thinking I think my work is very intuitive unplanned it demands patience you have to enjoy working this way to make this kind of work sort of meditative and slow looking closely and trying to get trying to go in a little deeper inward painting I believe is something that carries an element of nostalgia for him coming back to those days when he was still struggling to find his voices and artists and I think maybe it's that time in his career when he wants to revisit an earlier chapter and see how differently he might do that today so perhaps works a full of intricate details subtle connections at a circular in nature from his early paintings and simple forms to his complex geometric shapes and abstract paintings they all connect to his most recent sculpture a simple flower a kid will not go to my grid and say wow what is that what does it mean a kid will come to the flower and say what is that flower maybe it doesn't have any meaning at it than that and maybe that's okay you don't have to make a flower that makes sense the cycles in so perhaps work a reflected in his life it took his father the man who was responsible for teaching him how to work with his hands thirty years to return to Cambodia he says that so son you just making baskets people are paying money for this you know I said yeah I know it's crazy it's a really crazy thing you know there's been an incredible interest in some people's work from around the world and I think that it is made in a way that moves across artistic forms that it moves across artistic languages he's been extremely successful in marrying of niculae idiom which is its use of indigenous materials with a very accessible international visual language and I think this really is why he's so successful in the art world today it comes out of this kind of very deep kind of part of yourself where it resonates there's a certain beauty and aesthetic that you're drawn to and for each person that becomes quite a different experience in arts you are adding something special or unique to a lot of people's lives I'm thinking I'm doing something useful with my time [Music] brilliant ideas powered by hyundai motor

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 106,322

Keywords: Bloomberg, Sopheap Pich, Cambodia, Southeast Asia, bamboo, rattan, art, sculpture

Id: PrUCuA_oAH8

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2016