Sopheak Sam: គ្រប់យ៉ាងក្នុងខ្សែភ្នែកអ្នកមិនមានខ្ញុំ (i love the way you see the world, but why can't you see me?)

Exhibition Abstract

I sing our songs in the forest,
but you sweep away the temple dust
I conjure you in the future,
but cannot find you before enlisting
I gnaw at your waist and thigh,
but your breath is soft and fragile
I think of you oh-so often,
but only when the weaver ants come to march
I empty every drip of your honey,
but your fever still took me out

I hate the way you disappear, only to come back and hold me tight
I hate all of your impossibilities, but these promises weren't your lies
I hate the way you tell our story, only to drive home without a helmet
I love to pretend to know you, but your face is flushed from cognac
I love the moments you stopped me, only to read my fortune
I love the way your mouth curls to the song, but this karaoke is dead
I love the way you see the world, but why can’t you see me?

Working from a collection of family photographs as a point of departure, this exhibition engages with opacity to reveal and conceal suspended fragments of time, desire, intimacy, and inheritance. Engaging histories of postcoloniality and post-Cold War in Cambodia, i love the way you see the world, but why can’t you see me? resists "being" and points to horizons and vanishing points as counter-memorial sites of "becoming."

Exhibitor Biography

Sopheak Sam (M.F.A. '25) is an artist born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts (ancestral homeland of the Pawtucket and Wamesit communities). Their work traces affect and intimacies across historical movements in Cambodian-U.S. migration to articulate formations of postwar subjectivity, queer spectrality, and transience and impermanence in sites of encampment.