Cambodian Contemporary Arts to Be Showcased

By the time the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime finished filling the killing fields in Cambodia in the 1970s, more than 90 percent of the country's artists and intellectuals had been wiped out. In recent years, Cambodia's artistic community has slowly been rebuilding itself, and this coming spring some of the results will be on display in New York City at the Season of Cambodia festival. This gathering of more than 125 artists, performers and scholars will present Cambodian film, dance, visual art, shadow puppetry and more at venues all around the city, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Asia Society and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The celebration is being hosted by Cambodian Living Arts, a nonprofit group based in Phnom Penh that was founded in 1998 by Arn Chorn-Pond, who survived the mass killings as a child and eventually came to the United States. “When I first returned to Cambodia in the '90s after the Paris peace accord, my friends and I were finding master teachers living on the streets - poor, weak, without food and basic health care,” said Mr. Chorn-Pond, whose work in rescuing these artists was detailed in the PBS documentary “The Flute Player.” The festival will run from April 6 through May 31, 2013.