Sopheak Sam

Lives and works in Boston, MA

Artist statement

Sopheak Sam is a Cambodian-American queer artist and former child refugee whose sensuous and spatial interventions distill postwar intimacies. Drawing from history and family records, Sam pieces fragmentary memories into material and spatial forms. Their work scaffolds the vernacular and the everyday into layered, ornamental thresholds, stuck in an unsettled space between insider and outsider. Often unfolding as room-scale installations, their interdisciplinary work use mimicry and dissolution to trace the afterlives of Cambodian refugeehood. Taking shape as painting, sculpture, video, fiber, writing, and ephemera, their studio practice is autoethnographic – informed by decolonial methodologies at the interstices of affect and trauma theory, critical refugee studies, queer of color critique, cosmopolitanism, and vernacular Buddhism. Their research inquiry reframes how we might view queer/Asian/diaspora within multiple entangled intellectual genealogies, political formations, and relational socialities.

Artwork