Word: cambodians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...good at his job as an E.R. physician in the Sacramento area that he was recruited for an unpaid three-month stint caring for Cambodian refugees at a bush camp in eastern Thailand. Treating the injuries resulting from Cambodia's civil war reinforced his feelings about gun violence. "We saw 20 or 30 cases of battle trauma a day," he says...
Roger Rosenblatt only touched on the tragedy that befell the Cambodian people at the hands of Pol Pot and his followers [ESSAY, Aug. 18]. It's difficult to imagine the hardship and cruelty that Cambodians endured during Pol Pot's reign of terror. But Rosenblatt apparently let his imagination run wild when he blamed the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as the destabilizing influence that allowed Pol Pot to flourish. I could have sworn we were bombing the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops that sought refuge in Cambodia after attacking our own troops in South Vietnam...
...Cambodia's very name reeks of slaughter. The West needs to be reminded of its immense cultural heritage, and of the struggle--against all odds--to preserve it. Only a handful of Western historians and curators, mainly in France and America, are experts in ancient Cambodian art, and its fate within Cambodia for the past few decades has skirted catastrophe. Much of it has been looted from unguarded sites for the voracious Western art market...
...under which so much of it precariously survives. To walk into this show is to shift gears; to be immersed in an extremely slow-moving tradition to which the idea of innovation, beloved in the West, means little or nothing. Compared with Indian sculpture, from which it ultimately derives, Cambodian art is quite restricted in its range of subject: there isn't the same bewildering pullulation of different gods. In Cambodia the same cast recurs again and again: the Buddha in his various forms; the main Hindu deities: Shiva, Vishnu, the elephant god Ganesha and so forth. And there...
...actually looked like the stone effigy made of him in the late 12th century, and it is most unlikely that he ever sat for its sculptor. (No social prestige attached to being a Khmer sculptor, and not a single artist's name in all the 1,000 years of Cambodian art has been recorded.) Which hardly matters, since the subject of this dense, exquisitely carved image is less a man than a conception of kingship: full of presence but withdrawn in meditation, centered, and plain to the point of humility. As pure as any Brancusi...