Night vision
15 June 2012 - Phnom Penh Post
(Artist Chris Coles’ recently released photo essay Noir Nights in Phnom Penh
is a prelude to a book that will provide a fleeting glimpse of the
capital’s neon allure. He spoke to the Phnom Penh Post about the rapid, unpredictable
transformation Cambodia continues to undergo, as well as hope that
underlies his often bleak images)
Your most recent photo essay, Noir Nights in Phnom Penh,
captures what you call an “immense transformation” taking place here.
One of these changes is the proliferation of Lexus SUVs, which you
juxtapose with a subsistence prostitute sitting on a barstool. Where do
you think this transformation is heading?
I first visited Phnom
Penh about 10 years ago. I remember a very dark city at night with
almost no street lights ... some of the cars – there weren’t that many
of them, mostly really beat-up old taxis, hardly any shiny new SUV’s or
Mercedes at all – weren’t using their headlights, supposedly to extend
their lifetimes ... you could hear occasional gunshots ... there were
bullet holes in the walls here and there, I remember even in the cement
floor and walls of the duty-free section of the airport ... it gave the
feeling of being a very dangerous city, barely under control … and
incredibly poor … people on the streets, the tuk-tuk guys, the
motorcycle guys, the bicycle guys ... the working girls ...they all
seemed absolutely desperate for even very small amounts of money ... one
dollar meant a lot, made a difference.
Now, in 2012, many of
Phnom Penh’s streets at night are lit up with streetlights, with the
lights from restaurants, bars, businesses, public buildings and
landmarks … there are mini-traffic jams of huge SUV’s – Toyota Land
Cruisers, Lexus, Land Rovers, even a few super-expensive Porsche SUV’s –
as well as Mercedes, ordinary cars, thousands of small motorcycles and
tuk-tuks. Many people are wandering around with some kind of smart phone
pressed against their ear, dressed pretty well compared to 10 years
ago, definitely taking in a lot more calories, even to the point of
being a little bit “chubby” whereas 10 years ago people were very thin.
There
are still very dark, crumbling areas and streets, still lots of people
with almost nothing who are living day-to-day and desperate for more,
but things are definitely changing. There seems to be a gigantic
transformation going on, a huge acceleration of capital accumulation and
wealth formation, mainly by a small elite, tens of thousands, maybe
hundreds of thousands – is anyone keeping track? – of young people from
the impoverished rural countryside immigrating to Phnom Penh to seek a
better life, tens of thousands of foreigners along with billions of
dollars of investment capital from China, Russia, Korea, Europe,
Australia, South Asia, North America and even Africa, a seeming infinity
of small businesses being started, so many NGOs that they seem to be
competing with each other to “do good”.
The question is not
whether or not Phnom Penh and Cambodia is changing but how, in what
ways, and for whose ultimate benefit – just a tiny elite, plus those
managing to rise into a sort of middle area, the millions who are living
day-to-day without any bank accounts, no savings, no property and no
security, the foreign business/investor/NGO people and their families?
Besides
the growing gap between the wealthy elite and the rural poor, it seems
the expat community here is becoming more solipsistic and detached from
Cambodians, except for those who work in the service industry. Do you
notice many differences between expats who live in, say, Bangkok and
those who live here?
I would say the expat scene in Thailand is much larger and much more
diverse in terms of nationality, income levels, occupation, and activity
than the expat scene in Phnom Penh and Cambodia. Bangkok is in some
respects a very large and modern world city inhabited by (at least in my
opinion) about 16 million people from all over Thailand, Asia and the
world.
Although Bangkok and Thailand, like Cambodia, has a very
small elite group which is extremely wealthy, influential and powerful,
there is also a large middle and upper middle class, many of whom have
been overseas on business, for education, for work or holidays, many of
whom speak at least some English and who have had and have friends,
intimate and otherwise, from outside of Thailand.
I would say
that many of the circles that a Bangkok expat with a regular job moves
in include Thais and people from other Asian countries who share similar
levels of education, workplace skills,
international experience and
even income/savings. So in many instances, the relationships are less
one-sided, a bit more “equal”, than they might be in Cambodia where, at
least to me, it seems as though most expats are earning far more than
Cambodians, living in a far more expensive manner and having most of
their everyday relationships with other expats except for their
Cambodian girlfriend/boyfriend who is probably nowhere near at their
economic and educational level. Of course, there are exceptions,
especially for the small group of Cambodian expats who can speak Khmer.
I
would also say that it seems to me there is very little everyday
contact between the different groups of expats in Cambodia, those from
China, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, France, North America,
etc. whereas in the larger Bangkok setting, expats often have friends
and associates from many different countries.
What got you interested in Phnom Penh as a subject?
I
first visited Phnom Penh in connection with a possible movie project
that was going to be based on the Christopher G Moore novel called Zero
Hour in Phnom Penh – I used to work in the LA film industry before I
became an artist fulltime – and despite the decrepit and impoverished
state of Phnom Penh at that time, there was also something quite
wonderful – hard to pin down – maybe something to do with the resiliency
of ordinary Cambodians who were so desperately but relentlessly and
with determination trying to claw their way back into a more normal and
decent life for themselves and their children.
I liked the
music, Khmer Pop music, it’s a bit different, has an odd but wonderful
note structure, a beauty and poignancy in the female vocals. Sophea
Chamroeun who sings on the upcoming Songs from the Noir is a good
example.
I remember stumbling upon a very large Cambodian
wedding party, nothing too expensive, being held in the middle of a
rather rundown, closed-off street, but everyone dressed up in very
bright colours, a great live band doing Khmer music, people dancing on
the pavement, enjoying piles of spicy food and litre bottles of Angkor
beer. Watching the wedding couple and the surrounding family and
friends, I sort of felt the Cambodian people and Cambodia were somehow
on their way back, the social fabric was being organically repaired, the
women were willing to bring babies, new life, into the world despite
all the poverty, barriers and odds, and Cambodia was going to get
re-populated and reborn.
As an artist looking for material, I saw
it as a new world rising from the ashes and a very determined and
interesting people with a kind of unique look and style ... so I started
visiting every so often and thinking about what I could do.
Neon scenes pop up everywhere in your paintings and photographs. What’s the attraction for you?
To me, neon and well-done neon signs are mythical ... they glow,
there’s a warmth, a seduction, there’s a magical blending of different
colours, shapes and curves. They are pre-digital, often done by hand,
without exact angles and plenty of improvisation depending on the glass
and the amount of heat.
Neon implies something exciting,
creative, away from the humdrum … yes, it’s all just an illusion,
trickery with light, colour and shapes ...just “shadows on the wall of
the cave”... but it’s great show-business, artistic craftsmanship,
entertainment. I think the Khmer script particularly lends itself to
great neon signs due to all its curves and complications ... and also
because I don’t understand even one letter of Khmer script, many of the
neon signs in Phnom Penh are abstract for me, just pure visuals.
While
the working people in Phnom Penh who design and make the thousands of
neon signs probably don’t think of themselves as "artists", to me, they
are unconsciously carrying on some of the fabulous design, interesting
use of colour and artistic talent of those great Khmer craftsmen and
artists who went before them, all the way back to Angkor Wat.
Your
captions are poetic and evocative, and there’s a sense of a narrative
underlying your photo essay. How carefully do you select the photos to
fit this narrative or does it come out spontaneously?
The photos were taken on a number of visits to Phnom Penh, hours of
wandering around the nighttime streets, hanging out, looking, watching,
thinking. From the hundreds of photos, I want to get down to about a
hundred for the book
Noir Nights in Phnom Penh. I need to cut out about another 30. It’s getting harder and harder to let each one go.
I
wanted to not just objectively record the Phnom Penh night, but to
convey what it feels like: the feeling of darkness, the endless bits of
random trash, lots of people living on the edge, the feeling of the
foreign intruder/observer as an “outsider”, a sort of “alien” from the
faraway and very different planet (in my case the US).
I tried
various ways of “stylising” the photos, blurring them, adding grain,
changing colours and tones, framing them in certain ways, choosing
deliberately un-photographic subjects, images that were not beautiful,
in focus or properly framed. I want the viewer to feel like they are
wandering around a wildly imperfect nighttime Phnom Penh wearing a set
of night-vision goggles, looking at something they will never actually
know, that they can barely see but that they can at least get a glimpse
of.
The words and text plays as counterpoint, almost like a
different instrument or sound, and hopefully helps the viewer,
especially someone who’s never been around the Phnom Penh night, who’s
maybe never been outside a zone of first world comfort, security and
prosperity, to stop and ponder how most of the world lives and what a
difficult struggle most of the people in the world face almost every
minute of every day.
The photos of stray cats and dogs
(and the captions) suggest that you don’t see much difference between
them and the people who prowl the venues and sites you photograph. Is
this assessment fair?
I have often done paintings of
Bangkok’s many stray dogs, called soi dogs, and it is true, I see the
stray dogs and cats wandering around an urban landscape like Bangkok or
Phnom Penh as almost allegorical human-like creatures who, if we observe
them closely enough, can teach us valuable lessons about what life is
and how life should be lived.
There’s also a little bit of the
Buddhist re-incarnation thing, too, in my ongoing interest in stray dogs
and cats as Thais are often quite kind to them, giving them food and a
place to sleep, seeing them as perhaps the re-incarnated spirits of some
relative or friend who screwed up his karma for some reason or another
and got re-incarnated as a stray dog or cat.
Do you see the noir movement as a social critique and do you think this is spreading to Cambodia?
There is so much noir embedded in Southeast Asia: in the politics, the
often harsh economic circumstances, the huge income and wealth
disparities, the widespread impunity, the lack of transparency and
absence of any meaningful rule of law, in the traditional social
structures and customs that are under tremendous pressure.
As a
result, and in response to these actual circumstances, the noir artistic
movement is a growing and unstoppable force, much like Expressionism in
early 1900s Germany ... it is the lens that you look through to see
what is actually there ... not what we wish was there or would want to
pretend is there ... but what is actually there, however “unpleasant”,
“impolite” and “ugly” it may be.
After all, how will there ever
be less noir, how will there ever be more light, how will things ever
really change … unless we first understand and acknowledge what is
actually there. But in the midst of the dark noir vision, there is also
the dream and hope, that someday, against all the odds and despite all
the circumstances, humanity will somehow find something better.
Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who divides his time between Bangkok and the coast of Maine. Prior to becoming a fulltime artist he worked in Hollywood as line producer and production manager on numerous films, including Chaplin, LA Story and Superman.
