Shortly after immigrating to the United States from my native Cambodia in the early 1990s, I was walking through a trinket store in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles when I came across a beautifully reproduced head from the era Angkorian statue of the god Shiva. It was the only Khmer item in the store and I felt an immediate connection to it. In fact, he spoke to me, telling me to take him home so he could be appropriately situated and honored rather than let him drift off into an unknown world. Although Shiva’s head was too expensive for my limited means, I bought it anyway and placed it on the altar of my house, where I made offerings and prayed to my gods, ancestors and my minds.
For Cambodians, myself included, the idea that spirits can inhabit objects is common. They are found in religious statues or in nature – a tree, a mountain or the intersection of rivers.
My artistic practice, Cambodian classical dance — which UNESCO has added to its List of intangible treasures of humanity in 2008 – originated as a form of ritual prayer among the sandstone temples of ancient Angkor (but probably also in the Chenla and Funan kingdoms before that). Through dance, the king communicated with the heavens, asking for the rain that would fertilize our agricultural empire. Although dance has additional purposes today, including my own choreography for the proscenium stage, its sacred function remains its core. I was part of the first generation to study and practice classical dance in the aftermath of the Pol Pot genocide (1975-1979), during which dance was banned and some 90% of its practitioners perished. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea was officially a socialist country, and although the dance was eventually revived, its spiritual side was downplayed during public performances, while its sacredness was maintained behind the scenes. Following the signing of the 1991 convention Paris Peace Accordsthe return of King Norodom Sihanouk was welcomed by a Buong Suong ritual, a danced prayer for the blessings of the spirit world.
Whenever I visit museums around the world that house Khmer antiquities, I pray to the gods and ancestors who inhabit them. Sometimes I just put my hands together and sing. Other times, I move. It’s my tradition. It is an essential part of my identity and my relationship to these objects. When I visited the Guimet Museum in Paris, I marveled at the size and quality of its collection, which I knew had been taken from Cambodia under French colonial rule. But when I visited museums in the United States, including the Norton Simon, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was immediately delighted to meet my heritage and conflict with its dislocation from Cambodia. I was largely unaware of how he got to his current situation. I was aware of the problem of looting, but I thought such important museums could never be complicit in this kind of crime.
My understanding evolved when I was commissioned to choreograph a dance, performed by Mot Pharan, to celebrate the return of a looted statue of Phanna Bharamita from Douglas Latchford’s collection in 2021. Pharan performed the dance for a short film by director Ryan Barton, titled Returning Gods (in production). Separately, my college-aged son interned for a summer with the team to document and organize the repatriation of looted Khmer antiquities led by US attorney Bradley Gordon. (My son later writes his thesis on the value of returning such items as a form of soft diplomacy.) As a result, I became aware of the massive devastation to my culture’s legacy through an elaborate network of thieves and unscrupulous art dealers, and the complicity of many museums in this illicit trade, including The Met.
In February 2023, the producers of the podcast series Doug Dynamite, which examines the connection between the Met and the disgraced merchant Douglas Latchford, invited me to participate in a panel discussion in New York. When they asked if I would be willing to dance in front of the looted antiques on display at the Met so they could share a video recording of it during the panel, I agreed, in part because it was something I had already done. Ten years earlier, visiting the same gallery on my own, I had taken off my shoes and danced a prayer for the gods who stood on pedestals before me. They are religious objects created by my ancestors for this specific purpose.
So on February 28, I walked into the gallery with Canadian-Cambodian actress Ellen Wong, host of Dynamite Doug, and my fellow panelist, Cambodian archaeologist Meas Sopheap. Some members of the Doug Dynamite team came to record my prayer dance. As it should be, I took off my shoes (however, it was winter, I was wearing stockings) and approached the statue of the god Harihara. I prayed for his safe and speedy return to his homeland. I prayed in the four directions and then moved on to the main gallery. About two minutes into my brief dance, a member of the museum’s security team approached me and told me that I was not allowed to dance there without permission. He also asked me to put on my shoes. Now I knew the museum would be unhappy if they understood what I was praying for. But in this trance state, I was not prepared to be interrupted. In fact, in over 40 years of dancing, no one ever told me to stop. Although I obeyed without protest, I was thrown off balance. If I had simply walked to each statue and prayed, I doubt he would have felt compelled to stop me. Something in my rhythmic movement, quiet and moderate as it was, put the guard on the nerves. One of the people who recorded the video told me that he found my danced prayer so powerful that he was shaking.
If there was any uncertainty as to what the museum thought of my attendance, it was clarified when the Dynamite Doug team attempted to question me about the experience on the museum steps and the Met security team told us we weren’t allowed to be there. As I understand it, The Met is a publicly funded museum in a public park. I suspect we had every legal right to be there. But, again, we agreed and moved to the sidewalk.
The fact that I have been prevented from acting for the very purpose for which these stolen statues were created speaks directly to why Cambodia is demanding their return from the Met. They have no place in a New York museum, especially an uncooperative museum that thinks it should define how Cambodians can interact with them. I agree with Sopheap that these artifacts belong to the temples they were looted from. Once returned, they can be placed among restored temples so that local people can incorporate their presence into their daily lives. Likewise, people who would otherwise have seen these artifacts at the Met can visit Cambodia and experience them in their own context. Even if this is not possible, and these treasures of our historical and cultural heritage end up in one of Cambodia’s many museums, I can assure you that no guardian will ever demand that visitors stop praying to them. . We Cambodians, whether security guards, archaeologists or choreographers, know where our spirits reside.
