Srey 2021
The Srey 2021 group exhibition at Meta House in January 2021 built, in particular, around the theme of being a woman in modern Cambodian society but also of being a woman anywhere in the world. Srey 2021 was a visual conversation carried on through the photographs, paintings, installations, videos, performance and poetry from 28 artists.
Socheat wrote about her part in the exhibition:
I tried with my work at the exhibition to show clothing as a powerful way for women to express things about themselves to society.
I took a dress I already had and added layers of detail to it in repeating patterns. In a sense, the dress is like a painted canvas and the woman’s body becomes the frame used to display the picture when it is worn.
In Khmer culture, art is very important to women because mothers are the people mostly responsible for passing on cultural knowledge and traditions to younger generations.
We teach our kids how to dress themselves and tie their shoes and we should teach them how to create art from a young age and do it on that same fundamental level as we teach them to dress.