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Exhibition Reviews
"From Cambodia to Carolina: Tracing the Journeys of New Southerners." Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Ave., Greensboro, NC 27401.
Temporary exhibition, Dec. 7, 2003–Dec. 31, 2005. Barbara Lau, guest curator; Cedric N. Chatterley, photographer; Vandy Chhum and Ran Kong, community researchers; Kris Nesbitt and Sally Peterson, exhibition consultants; Monaley Tep and Kep Kong, Khmer translations.
Traveling exhibition, June 13–Nov. 27, 2006, Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, NC. Additional photographs by Byron Baldwin, Donna Bise, Eleanor Brawley, John Daughtry, Donna Foster, Chris Keane, Tina Manley, and Nancy Pierce.
From Cambodia to Greensboro: Tracing the Journeys of New North Carolinians. By Barbara Lau, Thomas A. Tweed, Sally Peterson, and Cedric N. Chatterley. (Greensboro: Greensboro Historical Museum, 2004. viii, 34 pp. Paper, $5.00.) Heavily illustrated.
Internet: brief exhibition description, publications, programming, photo gallery, and virtual tour, http://www.greensborohistory.org/exhibits/cambodia/index.html.
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| "From Cambodia to Carolina" vividly captured the experiences of thirty-five hundred first- and second-generation Cambodians now resettled or born in North Carolina. The exhibition originated in Greensboro. I visited it at the Levine Museum in Charlotte, where the staff had adapted and expanded it to include stories of the local Khmer community. |
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After entering the exhibition and removing our shoes in deference to Cambodian house and temple customs, we were greeted with two powerful quotations. "We just run, run, the bomb drop, I run to Thailand border," Sarun Yous remembered. "I look back at the mountain in Cambodia. I say, oh my country, I don't know where ..." Such painful memories did not define this fine exhibition, however. A quotation from Ran Kong invited visitors to consider the paradoxes of resettlement, cultural survival, and acculturation of Cambodians after their flight from the killing fields: "we're more than just refugees." |
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Indeed they are. Gorgeous color-saturated photographs of Khmer classical dancers and feasts at Buddhist temple gatherings pulled us into a world of renewal, generational tension, and creative acculturation. "How did an ancient culture find new life in North Carolina?" asked the exhibition's brochure. For details of the in-between horrors of war and flight you need to search out sources such as Ellen Bruno's searing film Samsara (1990); for such an exhibition, who would bare their deepest scars, and who would linger to gawk? Instead, the exhibition's curators and their community collaborators at local Khmer Buddhist temples and cultural centers focused on successfully revived traditions and successfully resettled and reconstituted families, communities, and religious institutions. At its core, the exhibition was a powerful testament to Buddhist belief and communal ritual, as a psychic defense against a genocidal Maoist regime and as a cushion against the shocks of flight and adaptation to an alien culture. |
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Creative adaptation carries forward and reshapes memory. We saw remarkable examples of living Khmer folk art: fish traps beautifully woven from bamboo grown in Greensboro, North Carolina, common tools raised to the level of commemorative art. There was an incredibly beautiful and moving display of Sen Ny's miniature carvings, evoking the range of Cambodian aspiration and endurance: several asparas, Khmer celestial dancers whose charge it is to reconcile heaven and earth, and a tiny replica of a prosthetic leg assembled from wood, scrap metal, and rubber. The leg looked exactly like those I saw in Khao-I-Dang, Thailand, made in crude workshops for refugee survivors of land mine explosions. |
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