When I first meet Leang Seckon, he is wearing a towel. We have been driving along dirt roads for several hundred meters, passing street vendors hocking palm juice, fried bananas, and spiced mussels pulled from the lake barely visible behind the houses we’re passing. It is a bumpy ride. To say the road is unpaved would imply it had been tended to in any way; it hasn’t been. The road is simply comprised of rocks and dirt and dust, exposed, raw, and open. Still, it is not unusual to see an older woman walking along it donned exquisitely in beads and silk. Seckon opens the door to his studio and welcomes us in, gesturing toward his mother as he dashes off to the back to put on a prim button-down dress shirt over his towel.

But let’s not otherize Leang Seckon; let’s pretend this is normal. Let’s make believe that you live in a tropical climate where generations of men have worn checked cotton scarves (krama) around their waists after emerging from a bath and see no reason to change their dress code just because the country is building its first-ever 42-story skyscraper. And that the nation lives on an average of less than two US dollars per day—most, out in the provinces, still rice farmers. Let’s say you live in Phnom Penh, a bustling capital city not unlike other bustling capital cities except that 35 years ago this one was emptied at gunpoint by revolutionaries who aimed to turn Cambodia into a rice-farming utopia, killing a quarter of the country’s population at the time and decimating many natural resources in the process. Let’s imagine that you lived through that, although you may not remember it, and many others that you know and love did too. Let’s say that, because there was a time when unrelenting starvation and petrifying fear were daily, you can also remember the time before that, when much of the country—and world—embraced Democratic Kampuchea in its early days as a change from the corruption, poverty, domestic instability, and international invasions and incursions that preceded it. Let’s pretend we remember how, even after the Khmer Rouge regime ended and the Cambodian people were “liberated,” that they were as liberated as one might be if dropped, alone, into a desolate landscape: sometimes, freedom’s just another word for nothing. So you recall that years of civil war followed, logically. Fights over resources, fights over power, fights that officially ceased a decade ago, but that bled across national boundaries and continue even today. Let’s say that the national leadership structure left in place after so many decades of political, emotional, and environmental turmoil acts, still, as if the end were nigh: threatening enemies both actual and perceived, grabbing land and forcing evictions, letting even the trees in the forests and the sand in the river and sometimes the kids in the neighborhood go to the highest passing bidder.

Let’s pretend this is normal. In fact, let’s understand that this is so banal, that you’ve worried one face of it into a beautiful smooth stone. This history of yours has thus accumulated small glints of light, contours and contrasts so eloquent they halt passersby. Your memories, worn thin in places but rough and engaging in others, are a pattern of lace so intricate machines can’t duplicate it. Your culture, complex and beholden to the whims of others, a drying delicate sheath in the wind, far more resilient than it looks for all the breeze it takes.

This is the history that Leang Seckon presents: tragic, odious, stultifying, unfortunate—and yet so, so beautiful.

***

“The Heavy Skirt is the meaning from the life of my mom,” Seckon explains of the name of his exhibition. His English, like his brushstroke, and his collage material choices, is far more eloquent for its imperfections. “When I am a child in the stomach, she wearing the skirt, the skirt cover the stomach and cover me. The skirt is of course the time of war.”

Of course.

Seckon was born in 1974, into the deep poverty of the Prey Veng province in the Southeast corner of Cambodia. His mother’s sampot—skirt—was old and quilted with patches. Thick. The family’s subsistence-level earnings from the rice farm where Seckon worked as a buffalo boy for ten years left no money to replace clothing.

At this time President Nixon’s—and thus the entire United States’—secret illegal war against the impoverished nation, the stated mission of which was to end Communist Vietnamese occupation in the neutral territory of Cambodia, had recently, officially, ended. The bombings that took place from then on were all therefore sanctioned, follow-ups to the several hundred thousand estimated killed in the secret raids (death tolls, when conducted, fail to take into consideration lost cattle, a major contributor to pre-Khmer Rouge hunger along the Vietnamese border.) Vietnam, locals recall, also raided the area. “When I am born,” Seckon explains, “the time of bomb, heavy life.”

A mother, heavy with child, living a heavy life, wears a heavy skirt. Of course.

Seckon’s work is autobiographical, and narrative. But not only of his history: his paintings and collages narrate the history of his nation, the real parts and the imagined parts.

Matted lush surfaces, uneven, scratchy lines, images pulled from the garbage, from ads, from other artists, from the media. Objects are worked into the thick paint: pockets, notebooks, bits of thread, photocopies, fabrics. Cambodia is a land of diverse contradictions, contraindications really, like the dust and the silk, the poverty and the jewelry, the corruption and the humor, the greed and the generosity, the vast landscape and abiding immobility. The US and China. The starvation of rice farmers. French colonization and independence. Capitalism and Buddhism. Collage is the only possible way to capture it.

His body of work is a collective, repressed memory, embellished at times, of a public unwilling to recall but unable to forget.

It is a heavy task, the Heavy Skirt. The time of bomb. Heavy life.

The time is made heavier by the lightness and enthusiasm of the memory of Cambodia in the 1950s and ‘60s. After generations of colonial occupation, in 1953 King Sihanouk declared his country independent of French rule. Cambodia celebrated by embarking on a spree of cultural production—epic films, flute concerts, modern fashion, and a unique blend of traditional Khmer instruments and surf-pop popularized by throaty warbler Sinn Sisamouth. (To propel his own always longed-for musical career, Sihanouk criminalized the radio play of other flautists. His harmonies were duly appreciated as the best heard throughout the nation.) Even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis came to visit in 1967— “fulfilling a lifelong dream to visit Angkor Wat,” as the hotels that uphold her memory still proudly proclaim. (Fittingly, Sihanouk presented the former First Lady with copies of his musical recordings.)

See, see: The Modern Skirt, Sampot Sivilay. Happy couples, trees growing bountifully, and orderly. Harmony. The music brings the rain to the lake so the rice can grow, and there is enough of it. Colors are rich, forms are pristine, brush strokes so sure: the painting is a meditation unto itself. And here, again: Soldiers Arrive at the Palace, Tiehien Mok Dol Veang. The king presides over multiple stages of art and music. It is an ideal of sorts. Hold it in your mind.

Because soon, Seckon explains, “The Sihanouk period gone. So then, Lon Nol.” In 1970, Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk with the support of the US. Under Sihanouk, Cambodia had always delicately balanced alliances between the US and China; now the balance was off.

And the country was under siege. “My mom,” Seckon starts, “She confused—the bomb from the sky. The tank is Vietnamese, because the Prey Veng province is the border to Vietnam and Srey Vieng. The Vietnam soldier take the tank and come to Cambodia to make the people afraid.”

In Torn Skirt, Sampot Rohiat—and too in Godenflower Skirt, Sampot Picar Mier—military plans come so fast, and there are so many, they are only a pretty pattern. Later, as in Heavy Skirt, Sampot Mien Domngun, bombs fall. They confused, too—are they wrapped bodies? Missiles? Penises? They are camouflaged, and decorated. They are sewn onto the surface of the painting, fixed there, never to reach their goal. And the goal? A happy modern couple, an ovum, the sun. See how the camo mimics the sky behind it. These bombs, these figures, they want to blend. But they do not. “The sound from the airplane, the sound from the car, the sound from the bomb or the gun, I am very shock and scary,” Seckon says, meaning now. Now, when cars backfire or planes swoop too low, or guns or bombs go off—and they do, still, sometimes—Seckon gets nervous. “I think this is feeling from that time,” he explains.

Flicking Skirt, Sampot Bohbaoeuy: When he is around one, Seckon’s mother is out with him and his brother in the fields, and she hears the planes coming. “The story from my mom told me was from when the bomb come from the sky, and around the house, and she and my brother were in the bunker. She tried to get me but cannot, so she just leave me alone outside of the bunker.” There he is, surviving black-lace destruction, watching birds escape to safety.

Things did not improve. “Until 1975, then Khmer Rouge time,” Seckon implores. “Khmer Rouge time is like prison. We all live in the prison.” Sampot Gop Phuot. Stuck-in-the-Mud Skirt. Mummies, faces borrowed from Tuol Sleng, with Khmer Rouge krama. The people are not fully dead: Seckon was there to witness. “They still alive, but . . . like stuck. Not a freedom at all. Stuck everything. So absolutely the shape of the mummy is living dead. Like the body cannot move”—he acts this out—“maybe the face and just they eyes, and breathe. Still. I compare to the living dead. Be living, but like dead.”

Still, things did not improve. “So after Khmer Rouge time, like French occupation, Vietnam come to Cambodia, stay. Long. Until 1990, something like that,” Seckon explains. Liberation, it was called: A January 7, 1979 Vietnamese invasion ended the Khmer Rouge regime, but the country was left without infrastructure, without laws, without currency. The Vietnamese installed a government but civil war still ensued, factions fighting for dominance over the few remaining natural resources. UNTAC stepped in, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, to help quell violence in advance of the nation’s first democratic elections in 1993. The violence wasn’t fully quelled, though—in fact, the proliferation of NGOs in the country created a new, popular understanding of what sort of wealth was available, now, even in Cambodia. Violence continued, a jockeying for control over a future that must, can only, improve.

The Bloody Shirt. Aow Brala Chhien. A collage of influences, all remnants of plays for power: the painting describes a confused national ethos. “People are getting different ideas from society, from the different periods,” Seckon describes. “Like example is me, getting confused idea from the society, from Lon Nol, from Pol Pot . . . and today. Some from ‘60s, some from the king period, some from the Vietnamese, the communist time, all mixed together. So many things different.”

A life blasted apart by so much tragedy—a nation strewn asunder—it must be mended, and Seckon does not rely on painting or collage techniques alone, but sewing, stitching, healing. “I use different fabric,” he says. Vintage fabric from 80’s-era military uniform, a krama, a camouflaged shirt pocket, the hip pocket from a pair of jeans. The shirt of a young man beat up outside of his home, bloodstains intact. “The fabric I compare to the skin: poor skin, rich skin, strong skin, killer skin. So I talk about the life very heavy. So much success and so much loss.”

It is a heavy life, and it requires a heavy skirt.

And constant mending: there are no concerns about gendered artistic techniques here, no emasculation at stake. Young boys will waltz merrily down the street of any town in Cambodia holding hands, still, and small girls traipse about shirtless. The pretty preening of a boy in a nightclub is hardly ever equaled by that of his girlfriend. If Seckon wants to sew—the national pastime of around 450,000 female garment factory workers—he will sew.

That mending, it is more than just a material concern. “My art is respect,” Seckon explains. The mending of canvases, of torn paper to base, of fabric to fabric, is a spiritual pursuit. “I don’t want my art work to attack. I don’t want any people—any people—like bad people, robber, hurt by me.” Cambodia is a Buddhist culture.

But it is also a dangerous one. The political environment is not good for those who wish to comment on or criticize the government, as even journalists recording known and fairly neutral facts are jailed, or worse, and most citizens decline to go on the record—about anything.

Overt political commentary is not easy to survive. Seckon simply narrates events. He is therefore a collagist and painter of historical narratives. His work, he says, does carry a message, but it is personal, and not political. “I just try to make you understand by yourself what you said to me is painful, and you try to understand by yourself that this is what you said to me.”

The history of Cambodia cannot be undone. Not the civil wars, not poverty, not genocide. Not border disputes, beatings, murder, corruption, bombings, or landmines. “History is treachery,” Seckon explains.

Yet from this churning treacherous mess, this mass of skirts so mended they grow heavy, beauty still emerges. A thick beauty, made of garbage, made of castoffs. Most important, the flowers: awash in lace, Seckon’s symbol for rice. A counterpoint to military medals. Sprinkled across the almost-dead survivors of the Khmer Rouge time. A gift from a singer to his fans, from a man to a woman, from a goddess to the earth. Flowers come from everywhere, and Seckon is their bearer, their narrator. He wants you to understand something, but he does not want to hurt you.

“Flowers come from my mouth,” he says.

***

So here we are, awash now in flowers. And tragedy. But flowers! Where does that leave us, where can that leave us, here in Cambodia?

Seckon’s contemporary map of his homeland is called the Salty Flowered Skirt, Sampot Picar Ompul. Up in the left, you see: landmines, lost limbs. Rice fields both poisoned and thriving. Angkor Wat. Logging, there, in the center, trees protected only by the Buddha. Rice fields dying in the drought below, the crackling of paint thick on lace a perfect extension of Seckon’s metaphor for rice. Land for sale, in Khmer and English. Along the southern edge of the country: floods, The Killing Fields, Tuol Sleng, and former rice fields carved out by dropped artillery shells, still smoldering.

A solitary long-haired woman, unsure of what to make of it all, visits the pagoda. She asks the fortune teller, Why is this happening to me, to us, to Cambodia? What did I do in a past life to deserve all this? What can I do to change my luck from bad to good?

The fortune teller offers her advice. He takes her money, and she believes she will have good luck. But, Seckon implies, this is a cycle, the movement of the tank wheels in the collage Whirring Rotors, Beating Hearts, Somlaing Rom Nyor. History is treachery. Just look at these paintings. They will tell you what you need to know.

In the center, the Tonle Sap, and the thriving capital city on its shore, Phnom Penh. The new Canadia Bank building stands, iconic and tall, only slightly dwarfing the crane working to its right. It is building Gold Tower 42, the first skyscraper in the history of the nation, a massive, shiny double tower with lush suites that cost between 72 and 60,000 times the average worker’s monthly salary. The gross domestic product of Cambodia hovers around a very low $6.5 billion; Gold Tower 42 will cost to build just over 20% of that.

There’s a real-estate boom in Cambodia—look, you can see it up in the corner.

You can also see it if you step out the back door of Seckon’s studio. The capital city’s largest remaining natural lake is being filled in with sand to make way for a residential and shopping district. At a peak rate of 2,000 tons per day, sand is being dredged from a spot in front of the Royal Palace along the Mekong (imagine it: Soldiers Arrive at the Palace, Tiehien Mok Dol Veang) and piped over to an area just across the bay from Seckon’s back deck. The project violates several laws, as do the evictions that result. Every day, the lake gets smaller. Hundreds have been forced to move already, and thousands more will join them.

Seckon, too.

No language can describe this feeling, no rage or sorrow once expressed has changed the rolling course of this treacherous history. Only image can convey. In Rama Rescues Victims, Preah Riem Juey Songkruas, Seckon documents this rape—of land, of women—the pink sticker says, “Save The Lake.” But it will not be saved.

You knew that already. To you, this is normal.

Originally published in the exhibition catalog Leang Seckon – Heavy Skirt.