Postcard from Siem Reap: four Singaporeans

“My events are like that. You show up, you better be prepared to carry shit.” This warm Singaporean welcome greeted me on my first day in Siem Reap, Cambodia. My trip coincided with the 18th edition of the annual Angkor Photo Festival, a 10-day event that combines photography workshops and public exhibitions. Since 2018, it has been helmed by 39-year-old Jessica Lim, an old friend whose lady boss incarnation I was just getting to know.

She had just gathered a random assortment of six men to move a thick wooden table. Two days later, I would be part of a different group of 12 men tasked to shift a 20-by-20-ft white screen that had been built on metal pipes. Jessica shepherded us. “How, my eye power not bad ah?” she said, once we were done, drawing laughs from non-Singaporeans being schooled in Singlish. And, perhaps feeling an immediate pang of guilt, “Guys, one beer each on me!”

The Festival was in the Chocolate Gardens, a park cum events space. At its centre is a café that does a yummy flat white and stocks both light and black Hanuman beer. Along its edges are traditional Khmer wooden houses, whose modernised interiors are used for a library, office and work spaces. Dwarfing these brown cubes are the towering trees reminiscent of the fabled Cambodian countryside.

Middle-class locals frequent the Chocolate Gardens—in a district some call Siem Reap’s Tiong Bahru—especially for its weekend market. But during the Festival this space throbs with the energy of a multicultural mash: the 15 workshop participants are from Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam; Jessica’s co-curator is a Bangladeshi; and a guest curator is Indonesian.

For many years Asian photojournalists have been telling some of the region’s most urgent, critical stories. The themes that emerged during the Festival—including on gender, sexual orientation and identity; deforestation and other ills of development; autocracies, borders and conflict, including the coup in Myanmar—offered a potent base for a melange of conversations and ideas, with local struggles finding resonance across cultures and time. Whenever I stepped into the Chocolate Gardens it felt like I was being transported to some mythical Asian commune of art, journalism, activism and passion, like a Bandung Conference for artists. How and why has this Festival emerged in Siem Reap?

Last week, after several people had told me that something special was brewing in this town, I just showed up, planning a week-long trip to coincide with the Festival. If my first trip was prompted by a wish to see one of the world’s wonders, in celebration of a culture over a thousand years old, this one was sparked by a desire to lose myself in the town itself, in the humans of today.

And if my first trip was guided by guidebooks, each day’s itinerary sharpened by Singaporean fastidiousness, this one moved to the rhythm of conversations, of the next human I met, plans shifting by the hour and season—the rain on my first day was so unexpected in “winter” that locals were grumpily sludging around in red mud, and Jessica was forced to scrap the outdoor screening (and move heavy stuff around).

For the first three days I just walked. I walked along the tree-lined river, staring at the reflections of quaint bridges in the distance, passing brisk walkers in the mornings, and in the late afternoons some students sitting on its banks and studying, and others chatting and smoking next to a bar-lined street, its owners sweeping leaves off the pavement and putting out plastic stools.

I walked to the old market and the French quarter, both retaining their charm amid the sea of newer shopping arcades. And I walked back home to my AirBnB, in the local Wat Svay neighbourhood—“Why do you stay so far from town?” asked my tuk tuk driver from the airport—which is dominated by the eponymous temple and the Hun Sen Wat Svay High School, a religio-politico label that honours the strongman who’s been prime minister since 1985.

Several Cambodians asked me about what’s good and bad about Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore. One can’t help but compare the trajectories of the Cambodian People’s Party and Singapore’s People’s Action Party, both in power for decades in electoral democracies that have long hounded critics, opposition parties and the media. In their question I wonder if they are seeking signs about their future.

That I am travelling relieves them, for this tourist-dependent town is still reeling from the pandemic. The number of air travellers fell by over 90 percent from 2019 to 2021. This threatened the livelihoods of everybody from expatriate restaurateurs, many of whom lost businesses, to the Cambodian woman who supplies chicken for Jessica’s dog’s food. “There was a time when I didn’t know if we’d be here again,” Jessica said in her opening Festival speech.

For most of 2022 the town was still licking its wounds, but there’s now hope in the air, expressed in the smiles from old women who look up in fascination, to the young baristas rushing to take orders; from Roberto the Italian who has just returned to start making local mozzarella and guanciale again, to Chitra the Phnom Penh native who loves life in a town that is cheaper, more artistic, and with less traffic; and hope, as well, from the bull thrashing its head around in the fresh rain water, to the ducks quacking as the sun sets over the lush, green paddy fields that still exist behind rows of new houses in town.

Whatever their misgivings about politics, the locals are thrilled that authorities used the pandemic lull to accelerate road construction, employing even former tour guides looking for work. Alas, unscrupulous contractors failed to pay some, I heard. Still, where there were once dirt roads, there is now concrete. Moving around Siem Reap has never been easier.

Footprint Cafe and 1961 coffee, for instance, are elegant spaces whose ambience and coffee rival those in far richer cities around Asia and in the West. I tried an incredibly moist apple muffin and carrot cake at The Muffin Man, founded by a Cambodian who trained in Australia. Elsewhere I saw signs for croissants, kombucha, kefir, gluten free and vegan. I started to worry about an insufferable hipster invasion but then realised an important difference, at least to my naive, one-week-traveller’s eye, to Bali. In Siem Reap the locals appear much more integrated. There wasn’t a single place I visited, including the pricier bars like Laundry and Miss Wong, that seemed exclusive to expatriates. Neither did there seem to be serious economic segregation by neighbourhoods, which one observes in places like Seminyak in Bali.

There isn’t time or space here for any serious analysis of the relative impact of tourism. Or about the White saviour complex that some suggest lingers to the detriment of Siem Reap, and Cambodia more broadly. The traveller’s feeling is all I can share, which is one where commercialism didn’t govern relationships; one where I was moving seamlessly between chatting with a visitor, a long-term expat and a Cambodian; one where it seemed like my tourist dollar was genuinely benefiting many in the community.

I also met several middle-class Cambodians who had worked their way up from employee to owner. This includes Pheakdey Yon of 1961 coffee, who began as a barista and now manages three different spaces, including The Chocolate Gardens. “Boss man” is how Jessica introduced him to me. Perhaps the most inspiring was Polo, a 37-year-old Cambodian who trained under an Italian chef in Phnom Penh and then, having saved for 13 years, returned to open a restaurant, its façade reminiscent of stonewashed Italian eateries, in the very Siem Reap house that he grew up in, just off the river. I tried a pizza rustica and a pasta amatriciana, both doughs made in-house. At night, as his family helped out and his young daughter scurried around, I could hear visiting Italians and other Europeans repeating “really” to a shy, disbelieving Polo. “It’s really good…no really, really.”

Perhaps this is all fleeting, and my sensation of Siem Reap’s egalitarianism and openness now is what some might have felt in Bali decades ago. Maybe this moment will soon be lost to a predatory form of global capitalism, greater inequality forcing the very segregation I assume doesn’t exist today, perhaps after the new China-funded airport opens, but for now one can only revel in it and pray for its continuance. It’s a sensation on which the Angkor Photo Festival thrives.

After graduating from the Nanyang Technological University in 2006, Jessica worked for a year as a freelance photographer at The Straits Times. In 2007, she moved to Bangladesh, home of many great photojournalists. Over four years, she worked in different roles, including as a university lecturer on photojournalism and photo editor at the Drik Picture Agency, made many great friends, and picked up a smattering of Bengali and a wicked South Asian twang. Her parents thought she “had gotten it out of her system” and would soon return home to Singapore, but in 2011 Jessica moved to Siem Reap to take up a volunteer position at the Angkor Photo Festival.

She oversaw two festivals as director before Covid-19 hit. Though they managed to host some virtual events over the pandemic, Jessica said that she felt depressed during the period, as the town hollowed out and many struggled to put food on the table. The first time she saw a backpacker in the middle of the street, she yelled at him: “Who are you? Are you visiting?” Moods lifted.

Over the course of the week I see Jessica striding purposefully across the Chocolate Garden lawns, her long legs propelling her forward, putting out one fire after another. When a question is posed, her eyes widen and her irises oscillate from one corner to the other, as if mirroring thoughts bouncing around. The range of issues she has to deal with is mind boggling: from managing established photographers far away, to the local groundspeople; from offering dining recommendations to the young workshop participants, to serving as their adopted auntie and therapist.

The Festival was founded in 2005 by gallerist Jean-Yves Navel and a group of international photographers, all motivated by a desire to share their skills with emerging Asian photographers. Antoine D’Agata, a 61-year-old French photographer celebrated, among other things, for his searing, intimate approach to taboo topics such as drugs and sex—he has photographed himself using and copulating—is the only one who still attends, and who has consistently tutored workshops over the years. While his body of controversial work has its share of critics, Antoine’s workshops are perpetually popular. “He’s a legend,” Sean Lee, 38-year-old Singaporean photographer and workshop facilitator, told me. Not the only one. Filipino Veejay Villafranca and German-born Australian Katrin Koenning, the other tutors, have established practices.

Over the week, whether at the public presentations or midnight drinks at a rooftop bar, where tipsy skateboarders roll around a half-pipe four storeys up, the presence of Antoine, Katrin and Veejay is testament to the fact that prominent photographers want to return to the Festival to give back. Separately, Antoine and Katrin were the only non-Asians among the six tutors and facilitators—there's much greater diversity in leadership today when compared with the Festival's White-heavy origins. On a related note, Francoise Callier, the Festival’s international ambassador who’s been involved since 2007, has long advocated for greater Asian representation in its works. “She’s the reason I joined Angkor in the first place,” said Jessica.

Access has always been important: the workshops are free, and so are all the public events. Volunteerism underpins the project. Yet when Jessica took over as director in 2018, there was still a sense that the Festival attracted an audience of mostly White expatriates. Access is not just about cost, after all, but comfort, whether one feels welcomed to an ostensibly high-brow event. She has thus sought to democratise it and publicise it more to the local community. Over the week I saw many Cambodians—school kids with their backpacks still on, young people dressed for an evening out, service staff in uniform stealing glimpses—engage with the exhibits.

The open programme, for instance, featured works such as “Looks That Lost for Killings” by India’s Partha Sengupta, which uses images of x-ray plates and medical documents to question atrocities and identities on the Bangladesh-India border. A curated programme by Indonesia’s Fransisca Angela, meanwhile, examined memory through nine Indonesian works, including a look at the lives of Javanese middle-class women in the New Order Era, who lived in material comfort but were part of organisations that “put women as if they were only husband’s wives and domestic workers”.

This year, Jessica also planned a session in a local university: a talk by Laurens Korteweg, director of exhibitions from the World Press Photo Foundation. There are no visual media courses in the Siem Reap universities, she says, so this was a rare opportunity for them.

“What’s the difference between press photography, photo reporting and photojournalism?” an 18-year old Cambodian at the session asked her.

“They’re the same.”

“Ok, I want to be a press photographer.”

“What a young masochist!” Jessica later joked to me. “But when you see young people with that sparkle, it’s so nice, so rare.”

Moeng Meta, one of the guest curators, chose five photographs from “Speaking in Silence”, self-portraits by a contemporary Cambodian dance duo, NY&KHUN. With their faces painted white and their hands in stark blue or red, the series is an exploration of societal pressures and mental health issues. Meta arranged the photographs, printed on large strips of white paper, in a circular fashion on a pebble garden in the front courtyard, inviting the viewer to move in and out of a semi-private space, alternating between an external gaze and, once inside, the feeling of being surrounded by intense stares.

Only on the third day did I realise that Meta had left us an “Easter egg”: the site-specific installation was designed as an aural chamber, with echoes bouncing off the paper all around, but only audible from the centre of the circle. I took small steps from one side to the other, speaking out words, stunned when I found the sweet spot. Looking into the dancers’ eyes, it was an eerie, electrifying experience, especially at night. I asked Meta, one of Cambodia’s most important curators, why she didn’t make the aural journey clearer to visitors. She said she wanted others to enjoy the process of self discovery: a gift to the few was more important than a full experience for all. She was open to organic diffusion: me, for instance, spreading the word. But the most she ever did was once put a spinning barstool in the centre.

This current of subtle messaging, of being unobtrusive, of simply creating space to allow the individual’s self to emerge, runs strong in the community. “I don’t like the words ‘teacher’ and ‘instructor’,” Lim Paik Yin, a Malaysian workshop facilitator, said. “But am I just ‘facilitating’? I sometimes offer suggestions that sound like instructions,” she laughed. Paik Yin led a workshop in visual anthropology, whose participants’ projects included a performance art piece by Api Husien, a Malaysian artist, who stood on an elevated concrete block, on which he had assembled items collected locally that spoke of “home”. In one final dramatic move, spotlights and phone cameras beaming up at him, Api pulled over his face a mask created from a collage of items.

I had not expected this at a “photo” festival. Thi My Lien Nguyen, a Swiss-Vietnamese artist, said that the Angkor Photo Festival is known for its willingness to experiment and engage deeply with social issues. For her participatory exhibition, My Lien (“sounds like million”) invited other artists and attendees to join her in cooking a Vietnamese meal made with local ingredients. Her practice “deals with the feeling and understanding of belonging and the sense of home, and is strongly interested in diasporic and post-migrant stories.”

A journalist by trade, Swiss-born My Lien started a supper club in Winterthur, Switzerland in 2020 as a “journey to understand my roots, and the diasporic way of preparing food.” It grew in popularity to the point of exotification. “I’m having a birthday party, my girlfriends are coming, can you cook your food and tell us about your culture and people?”

She started engaging in much more participatory food preparation, through which she hopes to demonstrate the diversity of Vietnam, and Asia more generally, to the Swiss. The Festival exhibition was her “first time doing it in an environment with all Asian people. I’m really excited about it.” From the edge of her makeshift kitchen I eavesdropped on the relentless banter between a group that had been together for over a week.

“That’s a lot of cilantro,” her sous-chef said.

“I love cilantro,” My Lien declared. “Everybody has to love cilantro.”

After My Lien served and presented the food, a cloud of quiet indulgence hung over the room, friends eating contentedly in (relative) silence—one practice, perhaps, common to many Asian cultures. My Lien’s work also helped me better understand the influence of another Singaporean lady boss in Siem Reap.

Like Jessica, Mavis chose to stay in Siem Reap during the pandemic. “How could I leave at the time when they needed us most?” But running a free kitchen proved challenging, what with pandemic restrictions and social distancing. The market near her home had to shut after an outbreak. Given the constraints, Mavis streamlined her operation. Instead of serving multiple dishes, she started making just one. Cambodians eat the crispy egg with home-cooked rice.

I had hoped to just stand around, drink 3-in-1 kopi and talk. Fat chance. The Australian found a knife and started sharpening it. She sat me down with a chopping board and asked me to help with the mound of chye poh. It was my first time handling a finger-sized chunk of chye poh. I’m used to cooking with the pre-diced packets one finds in Singapore’s supermarkets. Mavis used to ask Singaporean visitors to pack kilos of this in their luggage. But she has recently found a local supplier.

(My Lien, the Swiss-Vietnamese artist, said that sourcing ‘local’ is a challenge—think Vietnamese herbs in Switzerland—and possible spark for innovation for diasporic cooking everywhere, especially when faced with a clientele concerned about food miles.)

The chunk of chye poh, freshly washed and rinsed, felt soggy and tough. I had to use my left hand’s fingers to keep it unfurled while my right chopped. I quite fancy my knife skills and worked through it quickly. I presented it for inspection to the lady boss. “One of the most painful things to hear is the sound of a child choking.”

Back to the chopping board. Mavis also got me to give her a ride to the wet market on my scooter, which I had just rented.

“Do you ride in Singapore?”

“No. I don’t have a licence.”

“Yes, when I moved here at 50 I started doing things that I didn’t in Singapore.”

On the five-minute ride there, as I was still learning to navigate a pillion rider and potholes, Mavis told me that she wanted me to ride her not to the market, but through the market. And so I was given a crash course in slicing through the damp, six-foot-wide alleyways of a wet market, between fish and vegetable vendors gawking at us. After almost losing control once, I began to ride with both legs spread out, my feet close to the ground, like a child learning how to bicycle.

On the ride back, as I was balancing 10kg of brown onions between my feet, we passed by a recycling centre. Siem Reap’s waste collectors and recyclers, including those who collect cardboard off the streets, are some of its most vulnerable people. Over the pandemic, presumably as the tourist-generated waste had dried up, they had become Mavis’s primary beneficiaries. As we rode by the centre, a Cambodian man, lifting one blackened hand out of a giant bin, called out and waved to Mavis, sweet recognition in his eyes. They exchanged some Khmer words. When he first came to collect food, Mavis later said, she thought he was mute, because he kept absolutely quiet, perhaps uncomfortable speaking to those above his perceived station. Only much later did she overhear him talking with another recycler. “Oh, you do speak!” And they have ever since.

As I left Mavis and crew, I realised it would be much easier for her to simply dole out plain omelettes. But, aside from its nutritional benefit, the chye poh omelette represents much more. On the one side, a lineage of volunteer chefs from around the world, mostly middle-aged and elderly women, have learned how to cook it, with an appreciation now for the labour behind it, and perhaps one day reproducing their own version of it. On the other side, some of Siem Reap’s most vulnerable people have grown to savour the same dish devoured by Singaporeans of all levels.

That the humble chye poh omelette has stitched together such disparate people perhaps speaks to the power of diaspora foods, to the fact that Singaporean influence in Cambodia is about much more than Lee Kuan Yew and the next investment, and most of all, I think, to the notion that through food our essential connectedness to other humans, and the planet, is laid bare.

The 15 workshop participants, young photographers from around Asia, were getting ready to show their work of the past week, many exhibiting publicly for the first time. Their bodies looked knackered but their moods were energetic, adrenaline fuelling one last push. “Participants were dedicated and stressed out and cried a lot,” the MC opened, which offered to the public some sobering context to their works, to the emotional rollercoaster that artists and journalists sometimes subject themselves to in their practice, in their bid to tell important stories.

Some found a way to immerse themselves in Cambodian households, a process where social skills and trust-building are as important as any technical finesse. In “Good Night, Naret”, Filipino Geela Garcia told the story of Naret, a Cambodian woman born without one forearm and with a birthmark that led to her being ostracised from young. Strangers at first, Naret eventually invited Geela to stay with her in Kampong Khleang, a floating village on the Tonle Sap lake where she grew up. (Naret also attended the finale.)

Others turned the lens on themselves, excavating their innermost thoughts and fears. In “Sack Tap”, James Lontoc, another Filipino, described his journey dealing with testicular cancer. His photos spanned old shots of his bloodied removed left testicle, which had the audience gasping, to new ones of preserved plums and phallic symbols in Siem Reap, which had them chuckling. “I came to Siem Reap searching for ferocity, aggression, and toxic masculinity, yet instead uncovered a tender violence and quiet strength,” he wrote. “Through this experience, I question typical notions of masculinity that somehow still persist today.”

In “A Guide to Wearing Louis Vuitton Sunglasses”, Elisa Tan, the sole Singaporean participant, through a series of self-portraits satirised the “ideal” woman in a high-income society. In the process she questioned both the societal conditions that pressurise women to look a certain way, but also why she feels a “longing to be part of that same society.”

Sean, the sole Singaporean facilitator, had helped mentor Elisa. Aside from advice and encouragement to pursue an introspective piece of work, he offered comfort, she said, when she cried for over an hour the day before. After prodding from Sean, Elisa decided to stand up in front of the audience and read out her captions, line by line, as opposed to subtitling. She was the only one to do so. “What if they didn’t laugh??” Elisa later asked me. The 18-year-old was nervous.

Thankfully, lines like this, with accompanying photographs, resonated: “She washes away her dead skin weekly, and along with it, her worries about hairstyles, make-up, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.” In many ways Elisa was answering the same question that had been posed to me throughout the week: what’s life like in Singapore? It reminded me of something Charles Correa, the late Indian architect, had once said:

“When the hippies first came to India in the 1960s, people got very upset. The rich Indian, driving his new Mercedes, just couldn’t understand why a White person would be sitting in the road with lice in his hair. A friend of mine used to say that the hippy is sending us a signal: ‘I am coming from where you are going,’ he is saying. ‘And it’s not worth going there.’”

We typically do a fabulous job of trumpeting the Singapore Model to our neighbours, not least in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. It was refreshing in Siem Reap to be part of a more balanced dialogue.

As the night wound down, I followed the group to a Cambodian karaoke cum disco bar. Emotions swung from relief and euphoria to a quite intense melancholy, at the thought that this was probably the last time all would be together again. Many were just plain exhausted, “socially depleted”, looking for ways to “replenish my energy.” Jessica and Sean danced with the participants, while Antoine declined several invites.

“The energy levels are coming down,” Jessica told Antoine. “We need to up it."

“It's OK for it to come down,” he replied.

“I should let go.”

It was well past midnight. Jessica had spent the past few hours embracing participants as they told their stories in public for the first time, accepting their gratitude (“You’ve changed my life!”) and offering hers to the team of volunteers (“You’re amazing. You’re such a leader…You’re a leader.”)

As she slowly “let go”, I asked for her thoughts on what made the Angkor Photo Festival tick. “There are a lot of rough edges. We are a messy, messy bunch. But you need to be unpolished for them [the participants] to be comfortable...they are the generation who are going to lead. Set the tone for their own peers.”

And as I later reflected on my week there, some common themes—unpolished, unstructured, experimental, spontaneous, adaptable, welcoming—seemed to define the work of Elisa, Jessica, Mavis and Sean, the four Singaporeans in Siem Reap.

Sudhir Vadaketh is Jom’s co-founder and editor-in-chief. For this piece he's also indebted to many other people he met in Siem Reap, including Uma Bista, Moh Nakash, Farhana Satu, Toh Ee-Ming and Mien-Thuy Tran.