Sopheak Sam: I Miss You More Than I Remember You

Abstract

Fifty years since “Year Zero,” when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, April 2025 marks the anniversary of the Cambodian genocide. An ongoing provocation on remembering and forgetting, this exhibition charts a critical reconfiguration of the refugee—beyond notions of transnational belonging. Postmemory unfolds through the spatial poetics of Buddhist ritual imagination to honor life, death, return, and renewal. Corrupting archives and ephemera, this body of work ritualizes the vital materiality of funerary rites as a reckoning with diasporic trauma and the enduring hauntings of violence. I Miss You More Than I Remember You is an offering, a procession, a gesture of merit and karma—for spirits, ancestors, and loved ones; a space for reconciling past lives, distilling the present moment, and forestalling futurity.

The exhibition title is drawn from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in which he writes: “In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ.” This mirrors the Khmer word នឹក (neuk), acknowledging shared cultural-linguistic lineages as well as paying tribute to displaced kinship among militarized refugees of the American war and the wider aftershocks of U.S. militarism in Cambodia and Vietnam.

This exhibition is dedicated to all those lost during the genocide between 1975 and 1979 and those who continue to suffer under ongoing conflict.

Biography