Fonki, the tag name of a graffiti artist in Phnom Penh, was once a teenager in Montreal with a restless curiosity about his Cambodian heritage.
At 22, he began traveling to Cambodia regularly, developing a graffiti style infused with motifs from its ancient statues. He was also trying to understand how Cambodians were moving on from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the totalitarian regime that forced his parents, and hundreds of thousands of others, to flee as refugees in the 1970s.
Fonki, 35, now lives in the Cambodian capital and works out of a former garment factory. His murals of contemporary Cambodia — some will be on display at the World Expo in Japan in October — are still riffing on those ancient motifs.
“You dig it, and you research it,” he said during an interview at his studio, referring to Cambodian art and mythology. “That’s how you get back your narrative.”
Fonki’s search for a new visual language intersects with broader themes around cultural repatriation and rejuvenation in Cambodia, where at least 1.7 million people died by execution, forced labor, disease and famine under the Khmer Rouge.
Some of the statues that inspire him were stolen in the 1970s and recently returned by foreign museums and collectors. Many Cambodians see the statues as divinities that hold the souls of their ancestors.
Fonki, who lost relatives in the Khmer Rouge era, is one of several Cambodian artists who find inspiration in those statues. They are part of a cultural renaissance in a country where prominent artists were killed or disappeared after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975.
Some of his work is deeply personal.
The mural outside his studio juxtaposes statue heads with portraits of his great-grandmother, his wife and his baby daughter. The statue head on the left is a traditionally a symbol of strength, but in this case it’s being cradled like an infant.
“I wanted to show that other strength that we receive from our mother, which is love,” he said.
Fonki, who was born in France and moved to Canada when he was 4, is known for writing his graffiti tag name using stylistic elements from Angkorian sculpture. He was inspired by the temples at Angkor Wat, the seat of the Khmer Empire between the ninth and 15th centuries, and honed his style partly by painting murals in Phnom Penh.
Fonki’s visual language has since grown more pictorial and textured, according to Magali An Berthon, a curator and academic who included his work in a recent group exhibition in Denmark. His lettering, once more overt, now tends to appear as an under layer that gives the statues he paints a more three-dimensional look, she said.
Sometimes his lettering veers into abstraction through what Dr. Berthon calls “arabesque-like” brush strokes. She said a good example is the 2022 mural in the photo on the left above, which pays homage to Cambodian traditional arts.
“We’re quite far from graffiti, actually,” she said.
One of Fonki’s most ambitious works is a 118-foot-long mural that he completed in Phnom Penh this year.
In the foreground are large portraits of fictionalized musicians from Cambodia’s golden era of the 1950s and ’60s. Fonki painted them based on A.I.-generated images by the photographer Jeremie Montessuis.
Nearby is a portrait of Bou Samnang, a Cambodian athlete who became a social media sensation two years ago after she insisted on finishing a race, dead last, in a downpour. Fonki said he included her as a symbol of the Cambodian people’s resilience.
Swirling around them are motifs from Cambodia’s ancient past.
A divine serpent slithers by as Angkorian fighters — silhouettes of bas-relief carvings from Angkor Wat — stand in the distance. Gray graffiti lettering runs in a loop nearby, visually uniting eras of Cambodian history and evoking the concept of infinity that the serpent represents.
Then there is a figure in shimmering jewelry, shown in the photo on the right above and dressed as one of the celestial dancers on carvings at Angkor Wat. She is Ariya Oum, one of Fonki’s cousins, and she was terminally ill as he painted.
In a social media post at the time, Fonki called her “La Lumineuse,” saying she had been the brightest presence in his family. “Thank you for your light and for challenging me to capture your beautiful essence,” he wrote, a few months before her death in June.
Fonki is one of several graffiti artists worldwide whose urban murals riff on traditional art. Their work would have been unthinkable back when graffiti artists in New York and other cities were mainly inspired by cartoons, comics and advertising, said Julien Kolly, a gallerist in Switzerland who specializes in graffiti.
Mr. Kolly said Fonki, whose tag name was inspired by a rap group from Marseille, France, is still virtually unknown in the international fine art world. Still, he has completed more than 100 commissions outside Cambodia and shown work in several group exhibitions.
When Fonki travels abroad, he often leans into the history and culture of wherever he happens to be.
For the mural at the top left above, in Lynn, Mass., a city with Cambodian and other immigrant communities, he painted a Tunisian immigrant he knew from Canada in what he called a tribute to love, migration and resilience.
In the 2019 mural on the bottom left above, he draped a Chinese sea goddess across a building in Kaohsiung, a port city in Taiwan.
This year Fonki is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his tag name with new murals in Montreal, Phnom Penh and Osaka, Japan, along with a retrospective at the gallery next to his studio.
He said he hopes that his graffiti will eventually serve the same function that carvings at Angkor Wat do today.
“A hundred years from now,” he said, “if you want to see the history of a city, you can look at the walls and they tell stories.”
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world.
The post His Muse: Ancient Cambodian Statues. His Medium? Graffiti. appeared first on New York Times.
