Leang Seckon
Growing Wings
May 21 – July 9, 2022
Rossi & Rossi
11F, 54 Wong Chuk Hang Road
Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong
+852 2116 5282
Tue–Sat, 11am–6pm
rossirossi.com
Leang Seckon (b. 1970s) has lived through some of the most volatile and violent years in modern Cambodia, and his works frequently derive inspiration from the country’s tumultuous history. The artist’s haunting canvases recall events from the French occupation to King Sihanouk’s brief boom to the US-backed coup d’état, which saw the country under Vietnamese army boots, to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords to the present day. And his immensely rich compositions expertly weave stories, at times gruesome and at times magical, from his personal history into fablelike vignettes.
Art historian Peter D. Sharrock points out that ‘his paintings and collages attest to a magnificent, ancient sensibility that has survived the vicissitudes and periodic nightmares of Cambodian history. His draughtsmanship and technical innovation articulate the living presence of the artistic gift that produced the mastery of form in stone and bronze which graced the efflorescence of Angkor a thousand years ago’.
Growing Wings features Seckon’s latest body of work that condenses the dazzling changes in his home country into compositions interspersed with mythic Khmer folklore. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
