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I'm doing a collaborative project with another artist, Mary Hamill. My project is to gather the oral history of war widows, starting with the women of my village, Kop Nymit.

Chath Piersath

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Chath Piersath
History
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More quotes by Chath Piersath

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Some people have witnessed the killing of their husbands, or they survived other horrific things. My sister is a widow but her husband was killed after the Khmer Rouge. There are different periods in which violence has occurred, and differences in how these women became widowed and how they survived afterwards.
Chath Piersath
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I think every writer has their waves of inspiration and their ways of doing things. But writing is very difficult for me. It's something I haven't practiced as diligently as my visual art. I've been doing visual art because I think it's easier for me to construct, whereas words are very difficult.
Chath Piersath
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I think that there are certain feelings and things you can convey in a simple form that people can see and understand.
Chath Piersath
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I liked museums but I wanted to be a dancer, I wanted to go into performing arts, or be a writer.
Chath Piersath
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How am I placing myself in the world of other people around me? For me, I feel that I am not really alone, that others can feel it too. I see art in this way.
Chath Piersath
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When I was in the sixth grade my friend and I always won writing contests, and we read a lot of books. We were always the ones that read the most books in class. I thought about writing but visual arts weren't part of my vocabulary.
Chath Piersath
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I have a great advantage: I write from the perspective of my own voice. I'm not copying anyone's voice. It's my voice. I have the advantage of being a writer of English as a second language.
Chath Piersath
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The family I grew up in had three generations of widows.
Chath Piersath
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I'm also developing my own narrative, because I'm the son of a widow. And so, while working with women and gathering their oral histories, I'm taking a step back to do my own art book and visual work.
Chath Piersath
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I'd like to do more collaborations because collaboration creates different viewpoints.
Chath Piersath
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I think every person has a unique story to tell and we each have the different life events that happen to us and sometimes we may feel sympathetic toward a certain aspect of that life event.
Chath Piersath
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I have some advantages of viewing from the two lenses, the two perspectives. I think that a lot of visual artists who come back here from the United States and are Cambodian also write from their American references - looking inside the old culture, and looking at themselves as an American looking into the country where they were born.
Chath Piersath
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Even if you look in the dictionary you know the meaning of the word or phrase, but there's still the feeling of it.
Chath Piersath
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Sometimes I fantasize about learning to write in Khmer. Because if I could write in Khmer, my perspective would be very different, because I'm both an outsider and insider and I see the writing in a different way. My description would be different from, say, a local writer.
Chath Piersath
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You get closer to your own humanity by understanding the stories of other people and the struggles they have.
Chath Piersath
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Often when people tell their story, they talk about their strengths and resiliency. It's really about their determination and their aspiration to survive and live.
Chath Piersath
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You have to experiment with different mediums and things around you [making art].
Chath Piersath
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If I were really fluent and born into the English language, I would probably become a greater writer.
Chath Piersath
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There are multiple things entering in your mind.
Chath Piersath
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Everything around you can use. It's like your tools and your material. Whether it's in performing arts like dance, or visual arts, or poetry, a lot of those elements can come and help you, can trigger your creativity. But you have to be open, be aware, and you have to be ready to look.
Chath Piersath