Hidden Nature: Sopheap Pich

This exhibition will feature his large-scale sculpture, Rang Phnom Flower (2015), his most ambitious single-form sculpture to date. Twenty-five feet in length, its complex construction is composed of hundreds of strands of rattan and bamboo. The sculpture is that of the cannonball tree (“rang phnom” in Khmer), which in Southeast Asia is associated with the sal tree under which the Buddha was born. Pich’s tree is created at enormous over-sized scale, which conveys the power of nature, but also brings forward the plant’s abstract qualities by using precise grid–like structure and geometric shapes, in order to consider concepts of scale, the natural and the industrial, and the large that can be found within the small.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.