Painting History: An Artist's Reframing of Memory and War from Survival to Healing

When I remember the painting Vann Nath shared with me fifteen years ago, I see again the glimmering hope in his deep eyes.

Recalling the painting unravels a flurry of memories, their feathers floating, circling in the mind with a tint of jasmine and blue.

On a cold winter evening in 2002, Vann Nath appeared in my apartment, a bit to my surprise. The Cambodian family I lived with in Brooklyn had offered him and his travel companion some refuge, warm beds, and Cambodian home-cooked meals for a few days. In the U.S. for the first time, Vann Nath was to receive an international recognition called the Hellman/Hammett Award for persecuted writers and artists, administered by Human Rights Watch. But he would never let on how important he was. He wasn't the kind to like attention or recognition, and his nonchalance and humility intrigued me more.

He appeared taller and broader than average for a Cambodian man. His head of silver-white hair so starkly contrasted his dark skin. I wondered what in his life had made his eyebrows and hair so wispy. He looked tired, worn, and disoriented by the pace of New York City, its rhythms nothing like the slowness of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Time has washed away much of my memories of this evening, yet I still feel the awe and admiration I had for him when I first met him, and relish hearing his gentle tone and singular sentences.

As he unrolled the painting, he patted his palms over the image, and said: "Here, elements: water, fire, earth and air."

My eyes lingered on the edges of the painting, on his weathered fingers.

"Buddha describes what is in all living things in four elements," he said.

Silently, we appreciated the elegance of Buddha's teaching, and as my eyes scanned the painting, I began to see motion.

The lofty white clouds billowed against a turquoise sky and quivered with silver linings. The subject, a man with the same deep, dark eyes as Vann Nath's, holds his hands up in prayer, humbly surrendering to nature—the elements. He appears as if held up to the sky by the earth like an offering. But there is apprehension in his expression: some fear, some worry, some guilt; possibly a gnawing sense of unworthiness. The expression in the man's face displays a raw tension: some part of him obediently complies with the thing that is larger than himself, and yet there is a desire to be free from the thicket of a meticulously, sadistically, orchestrated history.

During our meandering conversation about paintings and life in Cambodia, l learned that Vann Nath had been a prisoner inside S-21, a high school the Khmer Rouge turned into a torture center. The S-21 guards were prepared to kill him, but by chance discovered he had a talent with paint and brush. The Khmer Rouge kept saying they'd kill him, but meanwhile gave him painting assignments, portraits of their leader Pol Pot, under whose reign nearly two million Cambodians died. When the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and removed the Khmer Rouge from power, Vann Nath was one of only seven people to survive S-21 prison, where an estimated seventeen thousand prisoners were killed.

Years later, out of what he once described to me as his own sense of wanting to preserve the history of the place for future generations of Khmer people, and to free the ghosts from inside his mind, Vann Nath painted images he could remember which documented life in S-21. In those paintings, which remain in the prison, now Tuol Sleng Museum, a starved Vann Nath stares vacantly at a dirt floor. His collarbone and rib cage poke through his black, ragged clothes. He sits, disheveled and disoriented, chained to horrific memories of the murders he witnessed.

None of those images matched the dignified Vann Nath sitting quietly with me then. Nor did the Vann Nath embodied and emboldened in the painting he had shown me resemble those historic paintings...