Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Vandy Rattana
Fire of the year
Vandy Rattana
Cambodia b.1980
Fire of the year 8 2008
Digital print / 105.5 x 63.5cm / Image courtesy:
The artist
Cambodian photographer Vandy Rattana’s ‘Fire of the year’ 2008 is a
poignant series of images of a blaze on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.
The fire razed the district of Dteuk Tlah (Clear Water), where 300 families
lived cheek-by-jowl in wooden homes above a polluted lake. Most
of the buildings in the district perished, although some were saved
through bribes and negotiations with the fire police. 1 Fires are common
in today’s Cambodia, as Vandy notes: ‘they are part of our lives, like
eating or playing sports’, 2 implying that the most unsettling aspect
of this tragedy is its familiarity. ‘Fire of the year’ powerfully gestures
to a deeper political condition in Cambodia — its expanding urban
populations, and the limited infrastructure available to support them. 3
With their careful composition, these photographs provide a vital
context in which to consider the reality of contemporary life in
Cambodia, a concern which sustains the artist’s practice. These
images are made all the more compelling through their visual
finesse — specifically, the artist’s attention to detail, and his play with
composition and depth of field. In one photograph, a fireman emerges
from a cloud of smoke, framed by the grille of a security door and the
tightly cropped head of an observer in the foreground. In another
image, a fire hose spouts an arc of water into a billowing smoke stack,
while another almost moves into abstraction, with its dense haze of
smoke filling the frame, the outline of a TV antenna barely visible.
There is a moment of sobering gravity — and perhaps precarious hope
— in the final photograph of the series, where a small child, almost out
of frame, fossicks among the debris floating on the lake for materials to
sell on the streets.
Vandy’s photographs evoke the rhythm and pulse of life in Cambodia.
Working in series, he uses light, composition and subtle layers of
colour to build associations between images. Photography is a
practice unique to his generation of artists; his travel within the region
as a resident artist and his experience as a press photographer has
deepened his resolve to represent everyday realities. Vandy’s serial
approach recalls the long history of narrative composition in Khmer
art, where epic stories and legends are vividly illustrated in the fresco
paintings and bas-reliefs of ancient temples. His images also have
an intensely cinematic quality; the frame-by-frame approach and
finely constructed compositions reveal situations of great drama
and consequence, and are perhaps informed by the artist’s strong
appreciation of film culture.
Vandy’s evocative and sharply observed studies of his environment,
however, suggest a passionate commitment to influence and
communicate, rather than to simply document:
My goal is to show life and invite people to examine life. I want my
pictures to have the smell of my mother’s food and the sound of my
father’s stories. 4
This intimacy can be seen in earlier works which portray quiet domestic
interiors and social routines, such as games of chess in the street, as
well as portraits of friends and family. His first solo exhibition, ‘Looking
in My Office’, was a wry and candid portrayal of corporate behaviour. 5
When employed at a telecommunications company, Vandy captured
the inner workings of the office environment by furtively snapping
pictures of his colleagues — applying makeup, draped wearily across
keyboards, and filing, endlessly filing.
More recently, Vandy has undertaken a rigorous exploration of the built
environment of Phnom Penh, where the changing cityscape has been
supported by a meteoric rise in foreign investment. 6 Canadia Building
2007 documents the construction of the capital’s first skyscraper,
while his collaborative project The building 2008 considers the social
and demographic transformation of the city’s first public housing
development, an iconic structure now slated for demolition. 7 As with
‘Fire of the year’, these images are considered observations of daily life
that make critical connections between present-day narratives and the
historical value inherent in chronicling the contemporary moment. As
Vandy Rattana says:
. . . it is important to create images because in Cambodia we lack
an archive. Documentation is both a reflector and creator of history.
We need documentation to help us understand the changes from
generation to generation. 8
Mellissa Kavenagh
Endnotes
1 The fire brigade is colloquially referred to as the ‘fire police’ in Cambodia, as cited
by the artist in an email to the author, 22 August 2009.
2 Vandy, email to the author.
3 The various implications of population expansion, land management and urban
planning in the capital are outlined further in Vann Molyvann, Modern Khmer Cities,
Reyum Publishing, Phnom Penh, 2003, pp.111–15.
4 Vandy, email to the author.
5 ‘Looking in My Office’ was held at Popil Gallery in Phnom Penh, Cambodia,
November 2006 – January 2007.
6 In recent times, Cambodia has experienced remarkable change, due in part to the
dual quest for foreign investment and increased economic growth. See Adrian
Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, ‘Country for sale’, The Guardian, 26 April 2008.
7 Designed by architect Vann Molyvann, ‘The building’ is an example of the school
of Khmer Modernism that flourished briefly under King Norodom Sihanouk in the
1950s and 1960s. Part of an ambitious city planning scheme, it has an important
place in the history of modern Khmer architecture. See Ly Daravuth and Ingrid
Muan, Cultures of Independence, Reyum Publishing, Phnom Penh, 2001, p.11.
8 Vandy Rattana, quoted in Erin Gleeson, ‘Avant-garde blaze new trails’, Phnom Penh
Post, 12 August 2009.
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