Chath Piersath Quotes

When you make art, those things change shape into something else. It's transformation into a body of different visual elements.

I'm very connected to the story, the history, and the trauma people experience.

I am a community social psychologist and a lot of my work deals with social work and helping people overcoming addiction and trauma.

All throughout my work, even in the United States, I have worked with the greater Cambodian community.

In Cambodian culture the male figure in the family is important; when you lose your husband you lose your economic ability to survive.

I thought of the pillowcases as a symbol of love and loss, of retaining the memory of your loved one.

The family I grew up in had three generations of widows.

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.

I think that through the narratives of other people you get closer to your own.

You get closer to your own humanity by understanding the stories of other people and the struggles they have.

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.

Every day you are bombarded by so many different things. When you sit down to process everything, it can become interesting visually. You can incorporate a lot of those things that you internalize.

There are multiple things entering in your mind.

Sometimes it may be something I hear in the news that affects me.

A lot of my work is process-oriented. I delve into my work and sit alone in silence and work with the material and process it, like talking to yourself.

I think that there are certain feelings and things you can convey in a simple form that people can see and understand.

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.

I don't approach my writing or my work from an academic or analytical point of view. I do it for myself.

I used to despair about the condition of the world, to feel a sense of hopelessness; now I find more and more that I need to focus on what I can do, however little it is, to help others.

In This Body Mystery, even though it was written in the voice of people with HIV/AIDS, it's about how people come to accept their fate and their sickness. It's about accepting the way your life is.

I've been coming to Cambodia off and on, six months of the year usually.

I liked museums but I wanted to be a dancer, I wanted to go into performing arts, or be a writer.

For me, the more I understand the story of others, the greater I am able to learn and help other people.

Sometimes the mere connection we make with each other can change people's lives. It doesn't have to be something big. The mere fact that you're interested in them makes them happy.

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.

It's hard to choose the right word, the right line. This Body Mystery is a small book, but it took me over ten years.

I tried to write poems in rhyme. I tried writing songs. Sometimes I jotted down a thought. I would keep a log of spontaneous thoughts.

I read a lot when I was in school in the United States, and even though writing in English is very difficult for me, I wrote in journals.

Art is really about how you capture different things you see around you and bring them into forms and words and shapes and meaning.

You have to experiment with different mediums and things around you [making art].

This is my first collaboration [with Mary Hamill] so I'm going to learn how it's going to work.

I started to paint in the year 2000. I never thought of going to an art school, even though I loved art.

It's really hard when you read literature in a language that's not your own. There are all these cultural references you have to be born into that particular language to get.

It's like you're organically developing yourself, moving out, metamorphosing into other forms depending on where you are, what you're doing at the time, how you want to play on things.

I write and I write and a lot of times I go back to the American lens, though sometimes it's a struggle to come from that perspective.

I think there are things I can't write in English that I wish I could write in Khmer.

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.

If I were really fluent and born into the English language, I would probably become a greater writer.

When you're reading from a different language that's different from your own, it's not the same as being fluent.

When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away.

Even if you look in the dictionary you know the meaning of the word or phrase, but there's still the feeling of it.

I'd like to do more collaborations because collaboration creates different viewpoints.