Wings of Tomorrow – The Fearless New Works of Pen Robit

An emerging art space, STP operates as a semi-commercial and semi-community art gallery. Founded in 2019, STP is determined to be more than just another gallery space for space’s sake. It is a site for Cambodia’s diverse cultural community, championing contemporary art as a catalyst for critical discourse, social cohesion, and cultural discovery. STP will showcase the best in local work, as well as a carefully designed and sustained program of public engagements and knowledge sharing. Under the leadership of our program director, Reaksmey Yean, STP strives to be Cambodia’s premier and fully commercial space for contemporary art within five years.

The Gallery’s name is derived from the intersection of the Khmer word “art,” silapak, and the name of a defunct art collective, Trotchaek Pneik, literally meaning “cool eye.” The double entendre of the name Silapak Trotchaek Pneik, “cool eye art,” means “beautiful art” or “art that pleases the eyes.” It aims to showcase, promote, and support works marked by originality and experimentation in diverse mediums and themes, and will make quality and excellence in the practice and appreciation of contemporary art its core driver. Its diverse programs include collaboration with local and international stakeholders and collectors, exhibition tours, and knowledge-sharing initiatives (namely, artist talks and panel discussions, art and writing workshop, and art history and philosophy lectures). STP will work hand in hand with practicing artists, art appreciators, collectors, the local and intellectual community, and its patrons to establish itself as a new hub for viewing art and learning about contemporary ideas and theory. It will bring contemporary art into mainstream consciousness by appealing as much to art lovers as to newcomers.

STP believes art is one of the essential pillars of sustainable, educational, social, and economic development. In addition, one of its main missions is to amass forces and resources to establish an Arts Center – an organism that is yet to manifest within Cambodia’s cultural landscape and art ecosystem.

Artist’s Statement

This series, Wings of Tomorrow, has its genesis in my lifelong fascination with the concepts of and the correlation between power, military, governmentality, and subjectivity. It imaginatively and observationally explores and expands the notion of “order,” be it organization and disposition, harmony and control, directive, and class. In and of itself, this notion is embedded with two antagonistic forces, if not a dualistic function or binary system, of positive and negative, of life and death, of beauty and ugly, of power and weakness, of real and imaginary, and of utopia and dystopia. In a spatiotemporal sense, these Oil on canvases both represent and constitute what might be considered as the manifestation of these paradoxes and as well as a terrain in which these paradoxes are at play.

The formulation of Wings of Tomorrow-scape, twenty-four paintings, has its painterly beginnings in two pieces, Military Boots and Still Life, which all are “still life” in their own rights, or at least in their compositional semantics. Setting against colorful and melancholic backdrops of an imagined and unidentifiable space, the central subject matters, black boots and blue vase with flowers, embody both strength and fragility, stability and tranquility, and, to me, memorialize what I would say the present absence of death, of which colors justify and formalize its beauty and presence. In Khmer linguistic proper, a flower is always associated with the conception of femininity or representing the woman themselves. This cultural embeddedness implies a correlation between weakness and woman, who, in this sense, are subject to domination, obviously by the masculine forces: pen, text, and male gaze. In this series, however, flowers are not women, and they cannot be. Instead, in this body of work, flowers provide an onset of beauty and life.

Wings of Tomorrow’s landscape is predominately coated with bright and primary colors: red, blue, and yellow, the genesis of all color palettes and color schemes, and the endless possibilities and imagination. In this landscape, I attempted to experiment with colors, their possibility and their permissibility, and as well as with my newly found interest in figurative painting. After a long period of playing with line and dripping techniques, this is my second time exploring figuration and including the form into my creative repertoire. My interest in figurative work could be a return to realism or a real-world instead of abstractionism. While realism may be a premise in this series, it was/is not my attempt to have my works obtain a realistic or naturalistic appearance. Indeed, the real and the imagined informed my creative approach to the twenty-four canvases, which in and of themselves scrutinize what is real and what is not.

Pen Robit (b. 1991, Battambang) lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Robit’s work attempts to represent

Cambodia’s past, present, and future socio-political fabric. He draws influences from Cambodian cultural iconog-
raphy as well as ongoing societal discourses.

He has been selected as an artist-in-residence for the following: OzAsia Festival (ADELAIDE) Australia (2016);
Peninsula Austronesia International Art and Culture Exchanges in Taiwan (2015); The Memory Workshop with
Vann Nath & Séra Ing, Bophana Center, Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2009); Southeast Asian Workshop, Tep Seri
Sok Sopha Studio, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2008). Solo exhibitions include: Out Of This World (2020), Richard
Koh Fine Art Malaysia; Beyond (2018), Tribe Cambodia, Siem Reap, Cambodia; Thread (2018), Sa Sa Art
Projects, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Krama (2013), Romeet Gallery, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Untitled (2012),
Romeet Gallery, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.