Samnang Riebe
MFA ’15 Fine Arts 2D
I currently perceive my newest works as Diasporic Landscapes. Their depictions hint at my own family’s immigration story from the country of Cambodia (colloquially known as Srok Khmer) to the United States that began over 40 years ago. The images are layered, wrinkled, pressed and veiled. Their complexity and distortion come from my being an American-born storyteller, telling a Khmer story. The conflicts and tensions from being between cultures and between languages serve as an underpinning constant as I watch their different sensibilities enmesh, disrupt, and negotiate within my paintings. It is here where I have found a love for those tensions at play and how they speak to expanded matters of ‘identity’ and one’s own understanding of ‘home’.
Samnang Riebe is a Boston-based Khmer-American Visual Artist whose upbringing was split between the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Eastern Massachusetts, USA. Through a lens of abstraction and landscape painting, his work investigates the visual languages that come from his own cultural heritage, as well as the places of his American upbringing.
