Sayon Syprasoeuth - Artist Statement

I make paintings to recollect my youth and to explore ideas of justice and spirituality.

Grappling with past experiences, I try to capture a fleeting beauty that I rushed through while growing up, moving from one place to another - fleeing Cambodia to Thailand, then Iowa, and finally California.

Memories, folk tales and intuitions are the source of my work. I often include elements to indicate specific events or scenes, but never enough to make them explicit. The subjects of my paintings are often mythological Cambodian/Thai stories that I grew up watching on stage and in movies. They include angelic children with magical powers fighting Titans from the sea or sky.

I am negotiating a field between apparent opposites, gesture and pattern, intuition and intellect, heroic and intimate, masculine and feminine. Since I am reflecting on the fragility and ephemeral aspects of culture and life itself, it is my desire to bridge these parallel conditions and have them coexist on the same pictorial plane. Also, social hybrids and cross-cultural references animate my paintings, combining Eastern sources with Western sensibilities. I use these elements because they are subjects that are disappearing and reappearing in my life, evolving with multi-layered complexity.