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queeringperspectives
Oct 4, 20233 min read

#41 - Presenting: Cambodian Fashion Excellence

In collaboration with SafeSpaceBTB

Today, we're taking a break from the flood of information we've been giving you over the past few weeks to introduce you to the wonderful work of this week's guest, Koemyean Hin.

Koemyean is a fashion designer and artist who also works as an art teacher at the children's art school Phare Ponleu Selpak (Light of Art) in Battambang.

As we talked, Koemyean told us how realizing his queerness coincided with his growing interest in fashion, and how he had to hide his interests to avoid growing suspicion about his masculinity and sexuality. He also told us that he decided to study art as a gateway to his true passion because fashion design was not a career option in the area where he grew up. Now, he is helping new generations feel empowered to express themselves without fearing repercussions.

His life story allows us to see the connection between queerness, art and fashion. For us in the queer community, this relationship seems obvious, but what does this relationship mean? Let's take a look at Koemyean's work to find out.

Tepsyort Art Fashion is Koemyean's fashion brand. Through the use of painting, graphic elements, and recycled and unconventional materials, he combines elements of traditional Khmer culture with contemporary art to create a new way of understanding clothing.



Using artistic elements and an environmentalist sensibility, Koemyean creates pieces that recapture the communal feeling characteristic of ancient ritual practices to represent harmony with the free-flowing energy of nature.

In reinterpreting traditional Khmer costumes, Tepsyort Art Fashion places queerness at the forefront by presenting it as something that has always been part of Khmer identity.

As we have seen with artists and fashion designers in previous episodes, creatives in the Global South often do not seek to break from tradition, but rather to recover the forgotten ways in which queerness was an integral part of the creation of these customs, while reclaiming a national image denied to them through centuries of erasure.

Fashion is a readily accessible medium for putting this message into practice, as ritual and ceremonial costume is a symbolic expression where values and ideals are circulated to the entire community through aesthetic forms that are easily understood by everyone.

Fashion already lends itself to queering -or is always already queer?- in the sense that it invariably is a commentary on boundaries that both reinforce and blur gender, temporal, and social roles.



So what is the relationship between queerness, art and fashion? We can see in Koemyean's work and life experience that all of these terms are grounded in, and only truly work with, total freedom for creativity. Queerness is about creating ourselves in terms of our own affections in the uncertainty of our own journeys of exploration. The same can be said for art and fashion, as both are our natural ways of expressing that inner exploration to the world in the hopes of finding meaningful connections with those who resonate with what we create.

And in the context of Koemyean's work with SafeSpaceBTB and Phare Ponleu Selpak, it is also relevant to highlight the importance of creating and protecting spaces for young people to explore their creative outlets without fear of judgment or repercussions.

For many of us, our first experiences of feeling rejected and different were in sharing the things we liked to do, from the games we played to the clothes we liked to wear to the music we liked to dance to.

Having the space for creativity through the arts, without the restrictions of social boundaries or strict gender roles, may well give us the tools to build ourselves and our identities with the same kind of playful exploration to make, to create, and to just be in the world that art makes possible.



References


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