In many cases the concept of art as therapy is used more by appealing to the romantic and spiritual gesture of producing art, rather than understanding it as a real therapy. Morn Chear‘s is a story that, on the contrary, shows us how finding an artistic outlet can help recover awareness, one’s own spark even after accidents that cast doubt on talents built up over a lifetime.
The Cambodian artist, born in Kampot in 1991, lost both arms at the age of 20 after an electrical accident. From being a professional dancer, his life undergoes a change of course, he finds in art a sort of therapy, within a process of change that he himself defines as a “metamorphosis”.
The multifaceted artist begins to depict himself within scenes of daily life that are an illustrated account of the traditions and habits of the Cambodian people. Morn Chear deals with themes of his childhood, the sociality within the villages and the agricultural practices that make the artist’s production an anthropological treatise and at the same time an intimate confession.

The intimacy of Morn Chear’s works is contained in the relationships that exist between people and in their sharing first closed spaces like small houses and then natural landscapes like rivers and fields. The black and white signs are furrows, like those of ploughs or like the ways of paths that testify to millenary human activities that have remained intact. Rituals in which food has a great value, as a result of the work of man and collective traditions.
Morn Chear depicts images that are photographs of his childhood. The rain dance, the nights fishing in the river, all described only through black and white, and simple shapes that recall rock engravings.
The role of tools is central to Chear’s choice of subjects. All the scenes are full of working tools or small objects, isolated in space, never piled up but always independent of the characters, though defining their role in the scene. Whether they are musical instruments, shells, or agricultural implements, the world experienced by Morn Chear is completed in the eyes of the viewer by the choice and simplicity of the subjects.