Sopheap Pich, now living and working in Phnom Penh, returned to his native country at the end of 2002, after living and studying in America for close to 20 years. Born in 1971 in Koh Kralaw, a small rice-farming town in northwestern Cambodia, he spent his early childhood moving among towns and villages in his province during the regime of the Khmer Rouge (from 1975 to 1979). Then, in 1979, he and his family fled the country, staying in Thai refugee camps before immigrating to America. His family settled in central Massachusetts in 1984, and Pich received his BFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1995 (before that, in 1993, he traveled to Mexico and Guatemala to photograph Mayan ruins, and he spent 1993–94 at the École Nationale d’Art in France). In 1999, Pich earned an MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. …see the entire article in the print version of September’s Sculpture magazine.
