In recent years, Angkor has become the subject of a seemingly contradictory process. As the site has been increasingly discovered by a global tourism industry, the vision of a glorious, ancient civilisation lost in the jungle has simultaneously re-solidified. Much of Angkor’s popularity as a tourist site today stems from its association with romanticised notions of lost histories, labyrinthine exploration and rediscovery. In their varying states of dilapidation and restoration, Angkor’s ruins also embody a sense of immutable (and immobile) ancient glory.

Emotive and compelling, these framings of Angkor have led to a situation whereby a surprisingly small repertoire of images are continually reproduced and circulated. Along with the promotional material of international tourist agencies, countless guidebooks, postcards and ‘coffee table’ souvenir books all rely upon a limited number of iconic images. Invariably, these include the towers of Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm under the stranglehold of giant tree-roots, and the beatific faces of Bayon. 

If, however, we return to Angkor’s first coupling with modern print media in 1863, when Henri Mouhot’s sketches were remodelled by engravers erasing figures to heighten notions of the temple’s ‘abandonment’, it is apparent images of Angkor have not only shifted shape but also shifted goods and messages. For well over a century, images of Angkor have been utilised to advance various political, nationalistic and commercial interests, both within and beyond Cambodia.  

In tracing these modern Angkorean histories, this exhibition showed the various uses – commercial, aesthetic, sartorial, cultural and political – to which Angkor has been put in the last 140 years, and highlighted its circulation, in and outside, Cambodia.  When placed alongside each other, the items in this exhibition traced the ways in which Angkor has been the subject of numerous gazes and aesthetic codes within the contexts of an emergent Cambodian nationalism, a French metropolitan culture, as well as the more contemporary image making industry of international tourism.

By bringing together such little-known representations of Angkor in the same floor-space for the first time, Ephemeral Angkor set out to broaden public knowledge of the shifting shapes and multiple uses of Angkor over time; and to heighten understanding of the global currency of Angkorean imagery while offering glimpses of the modern, moving history of this ‘national’ and ‘ancient’ monument.

Why ephemeral? A scientific term for insects with tiny life-spans, ephemera is used in the arts world to denote mass-produced objects of limited shelf-life or commercial value: things that rapidly date and fade, such as tickets, movie posters, cigarette boxes and restaurant menus, postcards, postage stamps and banknotes. We used the term ephemeral both to capture this mixed media, and to strike a contrast with common contemporary preoccupations with Angkor's 'eternal' material, physical and archaeological dimensions.

e p h e m e r a l   a n g k o r

(gallery opens in new window)