Sopheap Pich

Bauhinia Purpurea 5, 2024

Sopheap Pich

Bauhinia Purpurea 5, 2024

10’ x 3’11” x 1’1”

Commissioned in 2024 by the Lahore Biennale Foundation
Made possible with the generous support of Sopheap Pich and Axel Vervoordt Gallery

 

Bauhinia Purpurea is a series of sculptures that Sopheap Pich began in 2022.  Like the morning glory, a flowering weed that also helped nourish many Cambodians through the Khmer Rouge regime, and which Pich commemorated in a series of sculptures begun in 2011, the bauhinia purpurea is both pleasing to the eye and a source of sustenance, with the leaves and flowers used in curries and pickles, and as medicine, across Southeast and South Asia.  Here however, the artist depicts the bauhinia’s pods, with their delicate and gracefully curving forms and undulating surface given form in rattan, derived from the climbing palms that are also endemic to the region.  Pich has been working with rattan and bamboo as material for his art-making for nearly two decades, fostering development in the traditional craft of weaving and working with plant fibers by showing how they can be used to draw in space.

One of the best known artists to emerge from Southeast Asia, Sopheap Pich was born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1971.  He left with his family in 1979, moving to the United States in 1984, and earned his MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999.  In 2002, he established his studio in Phnom Penh, and two years later, began to make sculptures from local materials.  Pich’s work is widely exhibited, and in 2013, he was the first artist from Southeast Asia to be featured in a one-person exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.