Organized by the Khmer Magic Music Bus (KMMB)

"Phloy" is a musical instrument that is rarely known and heard its sound. Most people are familiar with this instrument in a dance called "Phloy Suoy Dance" which originated in Kampong Speu province. For the "Sound of Phloy" online and permanent exhibition, we will lead you to see the great exploration of this musical instrument in the Areng area of Koh Kong province with a beautiful sound that is almost lost.

"Sound of Phloy" is organized by the Khmer Magic Music Bus (KMMB) of Cambodian Living Arts (CLA), in collaboration with the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center and the Steung Areng Ecotourism-Based Community Association, and funded by the US Embassy in Cambodia (U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation).

Photographed by Paul K. Cummings

Neither journalist nor photographer, Paul Cummings was postwar Cambodia’s first tourist and was able to document various rare aspects of Cambodia after a brutal war and a bloody revolution.

Heading a pioneering tour company, he led the first tourist group to visit Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat after the fall of the Khmer Rouge and made many private visits to the country to survey tourist areas commencing in 1983.

“Welcome to Cambodia: From War Zone to Tourist Destination” is a selection of the hundreds of images he took of Cambodia at that time, and will form a permanent part of Bophana Center’s website.

Organized by Y-Dang Troeung, Photographed by Colin Grafton

Only recently have artists and scholars begun to reflect more on the meaning of Cambodian history after 1979, when hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees fled overland to the refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border. The largest of these camps was Khao-I-Dang Holding Center (KID), a refugee camp that expanded to the size of a small city of over 130,000 people in 1980. Here, and in other refugee camps along the border, Cambodian people lived out their lives as intervals of loss and joy, awaiting resettlement in Western asylum countries or repatriation back to Cambodia.

The exhibition will bring together the voices of artists, activists, and community members for a collective conversation focused on Cambodia's artistic renaissance today, with a focus on remembering the history of Cambodian border camps.

In addition to the online exhibition you are visiting, this exhibition is also on display at the Bophana Center​ from today until August 14, 2021. Please send a message to the Bophana Center's Facebook page (Bophana Center) or email at communication@bophana.org to book a place. The center can only accommodate 10 people at a time.

This exhibition will take place alongside a series of related events throughout the month of July. Please follow the Bophana Center's website or Facebook page.

This event is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.