Yim Maline and Svay Sareth
On November 5th, we will present the work of Yim Maline and Svay Sareth at The Gallerist for the first time. Both Cambodian artists have developed practices deeply shaped by their journeys between Cambodia and France. Working across multiple disciplines and recognised internationally, they each explore, in their own distinctive ways, memory, territories, and societal upheavals.
YIM MALINE - A Wound That Cannot Cry Out
Nature occupies a central position in Yim Maline’s work. Through drawings and sculptures, she reconstructs landscapes that appear simultaneously organic and unstable, suggesting processes of disappearance, decomposition, and regeneration. Her sculptures often use delicate or unconventional materials, including tissue paper, wire, found fabrics, and mixed media. In A Wound That Cannot Cry Out, Maline Yim presents nature as a living body—one that grows, transforms, suffers and continually attempts to regenerate itself. Interwoven forms resembling cells, roots, fibres, flowers, seeds and internal organs create a landscape suspended between the human body and the natural world. This body is in pain, yet it cannot cry out or make its suffering heard. Only its scars, fractures and signs of decay reveal what it is enduring.In Maline’s work, these signs become a way of listening. The exhibition’s title gives this imagery a particularly moving dimension. A Wound That Cannot Cry Out suggests suffering without a voice. Rather than depicting environmental transformation from a distance, the artist brings it into an intimate relationship with the body. Damage to the natural world begins to feel inseparable from our own vulnerability.
Yet the work also speaks of resilience. The presence of seeds, roots, and emerging forms suggests that regeneration remains possible, even within a landscape marked by injury.
“While Maline sees her work as calling for nature to be preserved, this recreated dream is not simply a tribute. In each piece she reflects on the threat hanging over this exuberance. She never forgets that alongside a natural world re-enchanted through the imaginary, loss is always a possibility, even in her most joyful and vivid drawings. Nature co-exists with the possibility of its own destruction.”
- Yves Zlotowski
About Yim Maline
Yim Maline is a leading Cambodian contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, loss, environmental transformation, and the lasting effects of Cambodia’s post-war history. Born in Battambang in 1982, Maline studied at Phare Ponleu Selpak art school from 1995 to 2003. She subsequently continued her education in France at the École des Beaux-Arts de Beauvais and at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Caen, where she obtained a degree in Fine Art and a Diplôme National Arts Plastiques in 2010. Her international practice also includes residencies at Bose Pacia Transparent Studio in New York as part of Season of Cambodia’s IN RESIDENCE programme in 2013, the Vermont Studio Center in the United States in 2015, the Sylt Foundation in Johannesburg in 2016, S-AIR in Sapporo in 2017, and the UNESCO Art Camp in Andorra in 2016. In addition to her artistic practice, Maline is associated with the SM Art Center in Siem Reap, where she contributes to art education for children and encourages younger generations to explore their relationship with Cambodia’s future and environment.
SVAY SARETH - The Decaying Heads
Svay Sareth transforms memory into a critical and often provocative language that questions how individual experiences become collective history and how official narratives are formed. With his works, the artist built a tension between craft and conflict, this way he examines the ways history can be monumentalised, concealed, or transformed into spectacle.
In The Decaying Heads, Sareth’s soft sculptures of Asuras, Apsaras, Garudas, and wings combine Cambodian cultural imagery with camouflage patterns and contemporary political references. Figures once associated with strength, immortality, and absolute power are reconstructed from assorted textiles, camouflage fabric, and cotton stuffing. They become soft, lightweight, brightly coloured heads resembling oversized toys. Each face embodies a different emotional state: pride, anger, hatred, jealousy, uncertainty, or sleepiness. Camouflage simultaneously reveals and conceals and leaves us with a persistent question: What remains of power when humanity has been removed?
“For Sareth, camouflage embodies attempts at survival for the men and women fighting for themselves. Because, for him it is the human being who is threatened with extinction and who has to constantly face this eventuality. The spirit of resistance, which feeds Sareth’s work, is always accompanied by a consideration of the precariousness of living beings and things.”
- Yves Zlotowski
About Svay Sareth
Born in Battambang in 1972, Svay Sareth studied Fine Art at the École des Beaux-Arts de Beauvais and at the École Régionale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Caen in France, where he obtained a Diplôme National Supérieur d’Études des Arts Plastiques in 2009. His multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and durational performance, and is rooted in personal experiences of war, displacement, survival, and resistance. Sareth transforms memory into a critical and often provocative language that questions how individual experiences become collective history and how official narratives are formed. With his works, he built a tension between craft and conflict, this way he examines the ways history can be monumentalised, concealed, or transformed into spectacle. In 2016, Svay Sareth received both the Prudential Eye Award for Best Emerging Artist Using Sculpture and the Overall Best Emerging Artist Award. His works are held in major collections including the Singapore Art Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, and SM Contemporary Art Museum.
