Painting Pol Pot

The younger generation favors more abstract works. Tith Veasna's "Blind Pins" is a mixed-media installation using pins and black fabric—a Cambodian symbol of mourning for a relative who dies. Vandy Rattana's "Going Fanatic" is a photograph of squares of light around a hammer and sickle. "It's not that the younger generation is forgetting," Vandy says. "It's just that we don't know much about it. After 12 years of school, I'd never heard about the Khmer Rouge."

Perhaps the most powerful painting is by the rising contemporary-art star Leang Seckon, whose "My Shadow" depicts a half-naked man whose mirrored reflection shows a skeleton. The man, which the artist imagines as part of Pol Pot's regime, is throwing a punch at his shadow as if wrestling with his own demons. "This man knows his guilt," says Leang. "He can hide it outside, but the mirror shows his true self." In the same way, "Art of Survival" is an unflinching reflection of Cambodia's attempts to reconcile the past.

© 2008