Imprint - Sopheap Pich

Today, we're in my favorite city of Indianapolis to meet with the artist Sopheap Pich.

He's Cambodian and lives and works in Phnom Penh.

But he's in town, making a new installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

And he's found some time to meet with us today.

Sopheap makes amazing sculptural works that often use materials found in nature, like bamboo and rattan.

We're meeting with him at Indianapolis Fabrications, where they're making some components for his installation at the museum.

So let's go meet Sopheap and see what he has in store for us today.

Hi.

My name is Sopheap Pich.

And this is your art assignment.

I think I was always been an artist since I was very young, because I was always interested in imagery, color.

But just the idea that you could make something out of nothing completely, and it's just really beautiful to me.

So when I wanted to make my first sculpture, I kind of coincidentally was picking up some rattan from a shop and cutting it up and trying to make a form for the first time.

And that was when the materiality really made sense to me.

Bamboo came a couple of sculptures after that.

As a stronger material, it makes a sculpture stand up, where rattan just kind of bends because it's very malleable.

The connection between the material and my hand is really where I felt like this is really working.

This is real work.

I started making these prints maybe a year ago-- about a year, year and a half ago-- because, again, I began to look at the bamboo strands as an interesting object in itself.

And it's different.

If you use a pen, like a ballpoint pen, and you make a mark on a piece of paper, you kind of know what that's going to do.

But if you use something so unpredictable, like a piece of bamboo, you really don't know how it's going to behave.

And I like that I'm not in control of how it behaves.

Your assignment is find an object that you find interesting, like a shape.

It could be plastic.

It could be rubber, something that is interesting, yet something that you can cut.

OK?

I want you to cut something.

It could be with a saw.

It could be like a metal saw.

It could be with a knife.

But make sure the surface that you cut is going to be even.

And then get some paint.

Get some house paint.

Put it flat, either on a tabletop or put plastic first and then put paint on there.

Dip that part that you cut on it.

And then press it onto a piece of paper to make an imprint.

I like this one because it involves materials that everyone has access to.

There's no excuse for not doing this art assignment.

No excuses this time.

You have the materials.

Yeah.

Or at least you can get them for like a $1.50.

Right.

And the other great thing about this as that you get to cut things in half.

How great is that?

Yeah, we have a four-year-old.

So we spend a lot of time talking about what you can and cannot cut in half.

Yep.

So one of the things that Sopheap told us is that when he started working in Cambodia, there were no art supply stores.

So one of the reasons he used bamboo is because it was available.

Right.

I mean, it's kind of unfortunate that art supply stores exist to begin with.

I mean, it sets up this expectation that if you want to make art you have to go to the store and buy these things.

Right.

Which makes making art inherently elitist, but it isn't.

Yeah.

For most of human history, there has been art, but no art supply stores.

Right, exactly.

SARAH URIST GREEN: In 1967, art critic Germano Celant coined the term arte povera to describe the approach of a group of Italian artists, who were trying out new processes and nontraditional materials.

It translates literally to poor art, referring to the common, less precious materials they tended to use, as well as what Celant saw as an anti-elitist, politically radical way of making art.

Giuseppe Penone was associated with the group and, in 1968, created a series of works in a forest, making rubbings of a tree's surface, wrapping a tree with wire, and gripping a tree's trunk with an iron cast of his own hand.

This affected but did not prevent the tree's growth and marked Penone's first of many explorations of the interrelation between humans and the natural world.

He also made 12 meter tree by carving into a beam of wood to recover the tree's original form.

Penone's way of working, like Sopheap Pich's, asks you to investigate the things around you-- whether it's a tree, or bamboo, or a rubber ducky-- and manipulate it to study its inherent structure, digging to discover a kind of truth or beauty or what have you at its core.

As far as choosing an object, I don't think it has to be a natural object.

I'm partial to it, because I live in nature and what's around me is mainly nature.

And if you think about nature, most of it we don't understand at all.

You choose something that gets you-- that you want to know more about.

OK?

Let's put it that way.

Something that you might want to see what is more than what it is that you're holding.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I make my bamboo stick-- one bamboo stick and one color-- into a painting.

I come from that kind of culture where when we go into a museum, we don't know what to do.

I take my family to a museum, and they just walk by everything, like, what am I supposed to look at?

So I'm always interested-- and my art is when people look at my work, what do they get out of that?

And for me, it's never the story.

It's not a narrative thing.

It's more about an experience that you get from seeing something that that experience you don't get from seeing something else.

And I believe that this part is quite important, because it's kind of an opening, a window, a door into another world.

So the bamboo is about the lines.

That's what all my sculpture is about really.

It's just the lines, the lines that I carve with knives.

And I'm trying to see if there's any sensation that comes out of that.

[music playing] Well, art doesn't have to be bronze.

It doesn't have to be big sculptures.

It could be just something that you're passionate or interested in.

And you just follow it on your own term.

You know?

[music playing]