Landscapes reviving across generations -Kim Hak’s My Beloved-

Landscapes reviving across generations -Kim Hak’s My Beloved-

Photographer Kim Hak has been a consistent advocate of documenting and revising the history and culture of his homeland, Cambodia, ever since he began his artistic practice in earnest in 2012. The Alive project, ongoing since 2014, is a representative example in which he has worked with communities who fled Cambodia's unrest since the 1970s and documents their belongings and stories in photographs and text. He has presented this work in various locations around the world, including exhibiting the fourth chapter of Alive in Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan, in 2022 and 2023. The exhibition created opportunities for dialogue for those who were forced to escape to Japan to share their personal experiences with the next generation. Inspired by this, several people with Cambodian roots in Japan formed the voluntary organisation ‘Alive,’ in order to find ways to support their community. The work of this one artist has begun to organically permeate into activities that bring people together and connect the memories of the community to its future.

Another long-term project that Kim Hak was undertaking in parallel with Alive was My Beloved. In contrast to Alive, which was created in collaboration with people with Cambodian roots, My Beloved is a personal travelogue of Kim Hak's journeys around Cambodia over a period of more than ten years, from 2012 to 2023. Using an analogue camera ‘as if writing a love letter’, Kim Hak’s straight photography carefully uses the light of different times of day and uncovers the lyricism of the land with precise framing, in a way far from stereotypical images of Cambodia. It is also a valuable archive of Cambodia's rapid transformation due to its recent rush of construction and development.

In November 2024, the project culminated in the exhibition My Beloved, held at BankART Station in Yokohama, Japan. 56 works were carefully selected from the vast amount of photographs captured over the course of the decade from 125 locations in Cambodia. These were divided into four sections as if tracing a long journey: the Mekong River Basin, the capital Phnom Penh, the Tonle Sap Lake basin and the south-western coastline. Some of these landscapes have already been lost. However, rather than nostalgia for the vanishing, it is the gem-like brilliance of a particular moment that attracts the eye. The exhibition was curated by Takuma Hayashi, who has worked on the art direction of numerous art exhibitions, with the participation of other first-class Japanese creators, including spatial designer Yutaka Endo and composer/sound designer Masato Hatanaka. The exhibition’s music, created by the latter, is full of serene but powerful affection for the homeland. Field-recorded Cambodian soundscapes allowed the attendees to experience the exhibition more three-dimensionally.

The photo book My Beloved, published to coincide with the exhibition, endeavoured to capture the same atmosphere. The book is made of soft paper that envelops the light and wind of the photographs, and each cover is wrapped in one of twenty different designs of the traditional Cambodian cloth krama, also warm to the touch. The aesthetics of Hayashi and Kim Hak, who were in charge of the design of the publication, has been maintained through this photo book, almost an objet d’art in its own right. During the exhibition, the colourful covers were displayed on the bookshelf in the BankART Station café, where visitors could enjoy selecting their favourite cover.

The opening also featured performances by Khmer classical dancer Sok Nalys and Khmer classical and contemporary musician Ros Sokunthea. Throughout its long history, Khmer classical dance traditions have been threatened several times, including by the invasion of the Ayutthaya dynasty in the 14th and 15th centuries and the massacres of Pol Pot's regime in the 1970s. However, it is an immortal culture that has been revived thanks to the hard work of the survivors. Inspired by the works of Kim Hak, these two young inheritors of the traditions performed a creative dance based on the story of the Dragon King Princess and Prince, which is said to be the founding myth of Cambodia, but with a contemporary interpretation. In the classical world, Cambodian culture, spirituality, nature and mythology are loosely connected as one. This holistic view of the world can be seen as a wake-up call to modern society, which has little continuity with nature. The performance, while immersed in the classics and showing their potential for the modern age, resonated deeply with the themes of Kim Hak's work, continuing the journey of Cambodian memory beyond time.

Nan Matsuhashi, a member of the voluntary organisation ‘Alive’, coordinated the dance performance and translated and recited the poems. She moved to Japan from Cambodia with her family when she was a child. For her, distant in time and space from her homeland, the landscapes captured by Kim Hak are almost strangers to her. However, she still called the images ‘nostalgic’. Nostalgia is an emotion that connects you to a place. Each of the photographs in My Beloved slowly and gently evokes the original landscapes from the memories of her parents, grandparents and ancestors long before her.

Kim Hak captures the ever-changing and eternal present of Cambodia in his photographs for the people living now and for the memories of others long into the future. Some things remain unchanged even in a landscape that is disappearing. That is the universal workings of nature and people that revive again and again, transcending generations.

Chiaki Sakaguchi