INSTALLATION VIEWS
Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, Pteah Chas, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, June 5 — July 5, 2026.
ពិតជាចង់ឲ្យខ្ញុំឈឺចាប់មែនទេ
Pteah Chas (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
June 5 – July 5, 2026
(Poster) (Credits) (Checklist) (ខ្មែរ)
(Video)
Created during a month-long residency with Sâmleng, Do You Really Want To Hurt Me is Sopheak Sam's first solo exhibition in Cambodia. Transforming the gallery into an immersive environment of freestanding paintings, hanging textiles, and video, the exhibition invites viewers to move through the space and consider their relationship to architecture, landscape, and one another.
The exhibition takes its title from the 1982 song by Culture Club, fronted by queer icon Boy George. Reflecting on desire and vulnerability, the song offers a framework for considering how pleasure and pain are constitutively entwined.
Throughout the installation, recurring serpent forms appear as ornament, landscape, and texture. Enlarged snakeskin patterns stretch across paintings and textiles, shifting between abstraction and representation. Suspended fabric hangings move through the gallery like currents of the Mekong River, drawing on the snake's longstanding association with water, transformation, and protection within Cambodian cosmology.
The snake also emerges as a figure of contradiction. Drawing inspiration from art historian Boreth Ly's conceptual formulation of "poison cure", the exhibition considers how sources of injury may also become sites of healing. Like a snakebite used to produce antivenom, transformation is rarely painless. Across the works, shedding skin becomes a metaphor for survival, renewal, and becoming.
Layered with motifs of gates, barriers, and fragmented architectures, the installation reflects on states of longing, solitude, and suspended intimacy. Revealing and concealing in equal measure, the works linger within the uncertain spaces between distance and connection, fear and desire, injury and repair.
Text by Sopheak Sam