Like many words, the Khmer word for “art” does not have a one-to-one equivalent in its translation to English. Selapak, meaning “arts,” refers to skill, ability, and mastery in addition to “art,” and in one sense, it could be translated into what we might call “magic” in English. The word sel (or sela), in turn, has associations with the holy, divine, and/or supernatural. This linguistic intertwining of what we might call “art” and “magic” emphasizes a long history of craft in what we now call Cambodia. “Magic,” in contradistinction to “science,” positions itself in the domain of folklore, seemingly at odds with what we might call modernity's regime of rationality.
Việt Lê’s Return Engagements: Contemporary Art's Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh takes up questions of the local and the global in the context of art in Vietnam and Cambodia, asserting that “[local...
