I Miss You More Than I Remember You
| dc.contributor.author | Sam, Sopheak | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-05-30T13:35:55Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-05-30T13:35:55Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025-05 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This thesis seeks to supplement and constellate various nodes of research within my exhibition, constituting an assemblage of material, sensorial, and theoretical formulations. 'I Miss You More Than I Remember You' is an invocation of memory and longing, unfolding as a sensuous installation that “doubles” as a funerary procession. International remembrance observing fifty years since the Cambodian genocide on April 17, 1975, reignited discourse over narratives of historical trauma, diasporic memory, and U.S. militarism in mainland Southeast Asia. Reflecting on personal and familial experiences of displacement and resettlement, I reframe the temporal and atmospheric poetics of Theravāda Buddhism to analogize the spatial sociality of Cambodian American refugees as stuck between “insider” and “outsider.” I posit this spatial intervention as counter-memorial, resisting the historicity of archives and gesturing towards the material ephemerality of Theravāda Buddhism, particularly by appropriating Khmer funerary cloth. The exhibition title—'I Miss You More Than I Remember You'—is itself a procession of words, sensations, and intimacies, taken from a quote by Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong—further articulating the abstraction, dilution, spectrality, and attempt at replicating that which is felt. By de-historicizing mourning and grief through the affective surfaces of Buddhism, this processional installation of objects and media distills postwar intimacies to forestall futurity and renegotiate diasporic belonging. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/116993 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | Visual art; diaspora; Cambodian refugees; Theravada Buddhism; affect; memory; death; funerary rituals; textiles; installation art; counter-memorial | |
| dc.title | I Miss You More Than I Remember You | |
| dc.type | dissertation or thesis | |
| schema.accessibilityFeature | captions |
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