Sorry you missed it!! The exhibition has now closed. But if you are interested you can still contact the Ponheary Ly Foundation or the Global Citizen Media, by clicking the links.

Go along the river road, North and eventually you get to the evocatively named 1961 hotel. This is a refuge for artists. There will be a story on this facility later. I went last night. Not to review the hotel, but to the opening of an exhibition. “Seedlings” is the work of 12 young artists from the Ponheary Ly Foundation organised in collaboration with Global Citizen Media. The foundation supports rural children, who otherwise couldn’t afford to go to school. They also support the teachers in the schools themselves. However, they also have a technology program run by Global Citizen Media. GCM teaches kids basic computer technology, and trains them on to media classes. There are currently 30 in the media program. The work of 12 young artists is currently being exhibited at the 1961 hotel.

So I went, and was greeted by a hoard of smiling faces. The gallery space is compact, and to exhibit 12 students’ varied art took some coordination. Along two walls and a special display at the back were photos. In the centre, some visual art. A table offered 4 computers with the students’ blogs on them. In the back room was a video viewing cinema. Lots to see and do. The photos caught my eye from the beginning. Graphic, colourful, evoking thought. An interesting display by Srey Leak showed photos of a house being built. The photos were very good, but to put them in context the students had built their own frame and hung the pictures from the string “walls”.

There was a set of pictures showing reproductions of old masters. Sopha, aged 15,  designed his project to recreate these. He told me the copying and recreation of the old masters in a modern Cambodian way was “like Cambodia itself”. He didn’t explain why. Van Goch’s sunflowers were copied using 12 lotus flowers. “In my village there are no sunflowers. So I tried to recreate his famous painting with lotus flowers because Cambodia has a lot of lotus flowers”. He also wanted to take pictures of limes. He couldn’t find a suitable work to copy until he Googled “lemons”. Monet’s branch of lemons provided the perfect model. Apparently he loved the shadows.

Bunpha is also a great photographer in the making. His arty pictures of crops in fields showed skill in the use of differential focus. He told me “making parts of the picture burred gives an interesting feeling.” Veasna, on the other hand wanted to work on close up photography. His chosen subject was a baby. A friend of his mother let Veasna take pictures of her precious child. Wanting to get practice at close ups, he took a can of milk from under the bed. The child crawled towards it, and using a true photographer’s sense of timing, he got the snap he wanted.

I moved on to the computers. Diana, founder of Global Citizen Media, told me they used WordPress (my favourite medium) using the safety net of edublogs. She said that even getting the students to learn to log in takes 30 minutes. However they have the determination to complete their projects. Edublogs provides them with great templates, and the students could pick their own. Back to Bunpha and he created a blog on Google maps. He illustrated his blog posts with stories about local places, and showed their exact location – and the route to them – with embedded maps. A great use of the technology.

“In my Cambodian village” http://inmycambodianvillage.edublogs.org/2013/04/05/farming-in-my-village/ a blog by Visal, it was nice to see him giving photo credits where he had been given pictures by his friends. Nice and correct in today’s age where many people just take pictures from the internet without permission or credit! There are some really good blog writers in the making. Maybe in the future one of them might write for the post … I’ll use this article to throw out an invitation to the Foundation …

The screening room showed the video work. The public was engrossed inside. I waited, and waited but eventually decided to come back. To do the project justice, you need time. I have plenty of time to re-visit. The exhibition runs to August 28, and I can not commend it enough. To read about the Ponheary Ly Foundation, check out their site on http://theplf.org/ Global Citizen Media is at www.GlobalCitizenMedia.org To see the blogs the students have created, check https://bitly.com/bundles/o_4e51qef71g/7

But above all go. Have a look at the work of future great artists.

Click any of the small pictures below to open a lightbox. You can then scroll through the whole gallery