The Sa Sa art gallery

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The Sa Sa gallery is a tiny art space that is connected and supported by Baitong restaurant in three sixty street opposite the international school of Phnom Penh.

The gallery hosts a new exhibition every six weeks and has six founders all who have contributed a single digital photograph which has been printed and makes up the portfolio.

The exhibition presently showing, the first solo exhibition by Sou Sophy is called Sra nge. The last three letters should not be confused with NGO despite the galleries situation in an NGO area. Sra nge in fact is a type of rice, the seeds of which are smaller and harder then normal rice and sweeter when cooked. This rice despite its sweetness is rejected from the normal crop and is thrown out, and discarded by the male farmers.

Sou Sophy has compared this rejection with the discard of woman in Cambodian society, who have been thrown out ,abused or discarded because they do not meet the norm or common mould like the sweet feral rice. She sees all woman as unique, valuable and useful despite perhaps a lack of education or conventional beauty. Or they might possibly be handicapped in one way or another. A mute woman for example was portrayed without a mouth, until the artist added a mask later.

Also unique is Sou's choice of canvas. The paintings are oil based but painted on a rustic medium of sugar cane or rice straw. This is an art form in its own right and must have taken hours and a lot of care to produce. It also signifies the countryside and the woman in the artwork are probably rice pickers and planters, collectors of fire wood or sugar cane cutters certainly not from the city. Yet she also says the paintings are abstract representations rather than specific woman.

Every painting is priced at three hundred and sixty dollars.

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