Será, a French-Cambodian comic artist, comics about Khmer history and culture Options

[boogie brat]

Phoussera Ing, better known as Séra, was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In 1975, he fled with his mother to France, where he followed several art studies during the 1980s. In 1979, his first short story was published in Circus. From 1989 to 1991, he created 'Comment Chuchote et Crie le Vent' and 'Port Massembo', which unfortunately have never been published.

Séra did not get discouraged. He created 'La Vespasienne' in 1993, a short story published in the Japanese magazine Morning, followed in 1995 by 'Retour de Soleil'. The same year, he created 'Impasse et Rouge', about the destiny of the child-soldier Snoul during the Cambodian war. At this time, he returned for the first time to his native country with photographer Marc Domage.

After his return, he created two stories for P.L.G. and two stories for the collective album 'Alfred Hitchcock'. In 1997, he started his series 'HKO' in À Suivre.

Interview with Será:

Séra documentarist

He was in Kampuchea with the arrival of the Khmer Rouges and followed, in, the misdeeds of the mode of terror carried out by pol. Pot, which cost the life nearly 2 million Kampuchean, carried out or died of exhaustion, disease, of hunger, in the vast camp of forced labour which had become the country of 1975 to 1979.

With Dead end and Red (Rackham, 1995) and maintaining Water and the Earth (Delcourt, 2005), Séra tells...

-Can you evoke your personal course before coming to France, and the way which took you along gradually, then seriously, in the arms of the comic strip ?

My mother arrived at Kampuchea at the end of the Fifties. His/her parents continued to address its preferred reviews of youth to him, namely the weekly magazines Spirou and Tintin . Very naturally and very quickly, these newspapers became mine. I had to start by eating ends of them, before cutting out them in thousand pieces to constitute me my first book of images. And that left me never again. Perhaps that my attachment with the comic strip comes also partly from these memorable nights when, in company of my brother and my sister, we monopolize ourselves our mother and it was to read us an album in entirety, aloud, only for us, in the air-conditioned room of my parents. I cannot abstract the reading from the Horn of the rhinoceros , to even think of Seccotine, without me to detach from these memories. Today, still...
And then, how to say ?... The comic strip was always a prolongation phantasmatic towards a culture, a country of which I smelled myself near, but who was completely foreign with my reality. At the French school that I attended, the college Descartes, one taught us the four seasons. Spring, summer, autumn, winter... as many concepts which were true abstractions for a kid like me, PhnomPenhois, which knew seasons only that of the rain and dry season (to make short). Without speaking about our (!) ancestors the Gallic ones !! On the other hand, these aspects, I found them in the comic strips... with Astérix and Obélix. To be plunged in a comic strip, it is also to tear off so much is little its body at the present. And that was appropriate to me very well. Headmasters, directors, and schoolmasters... my father even, hated the comic strip. What imports. My mother it, it liked that. And it is all that imported me. There was gradually a dimension of rebellion to post like aficionados kind and it was not to displease to me. Therefore, the data base like "escape" and "resistance". The data base counters the dominant thought, counters normality. Like "mongrel" child, I never was like different, neither Kampuchean the (pure one) nor French (white-white) then, to go as much from the front one.

-With Impasse and Red then now Water and the Earth , you tell the Kampuchean genocide with the same intensity that Spiegelman, with Maus , tells the holocaust lived by his/her parents. It of the work of your life, isn't this acts ? A cry repeated to ask justice ?

The work of my life ? I could not say... is not with me to issue such a thing. I am since 1975 in conflict with the uprooting imposed by the movements of the history. I did not know the Kampuchean genocide. Just first steps. I was still in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. I was then taken refuge with the embassy of France and, like all the foreigners, we were expelled towards the border inhabitant of Thailand at at the end of April. The genocide in Kampuchea was held in an absolute silence on behalf of the international community. Without speaking about that of the French "intellectuals". It is to my knowledge, the only genocide which took place and for which no person in charge still was considered and to date punished. Justice ! Which justice ?

Water and the Earth are a project which was started at the end of Dead end ... in 1995. But I blocked on many aspects of this period of the history. Two events shook me : one was my meeting with the scenario writer Rithy Panh, second was to read a declaration of Vergès in Paris-Match where he said, in substance, that the Khmer Rouges were not gangsters, robbers, but of the idealistic revolutionists ! So many conneries put to me out of me. To have only made such remarks, this guy (?) deserves a lawsuit with the bottom. It is enough to read and read again all testimonys to know that it was not thus. And so Master (?!) Vergès needs glasses, I will find some to him readily... Indeed, if you are attentive with the photographic documents of the time, you will be able to note that all the Khmer Rouges had watches with the wrist ! All. That they have less than fifteen years and more ! In did your opinion, these watches, where find ?

-In 2003, you could Impasse republish and Red , but you also made a point of reformulating the structure of it, which is the major reason ?

Dead end and Red were exhausted in two years. Since then, I wanted to continue this work on the memory. It was necessary me to find the best angle to reach that point, and that took a little time so that the ideas come to maturity. When I put myself at the CAM, I saw that I had there the ideal instrument to continue my work. To begin again where it had stopped. I wanted to continue to be in a treatment of the matter, visual, emotional, to speak about all this period of the history... of my history.

-Dead end and Red were centered on Snoul, a young man who had lost his parents and had found Khmer soldier of the Republic. Water and the Earth collect a mosaic of testimonys, including those of Khmer Rouges. Can you clarify this choice which points out the method employed by Jean Hatzfeld in his works on Rwanda and Rithy Panh in documentary S-21, the machine of dead khmère red ?

I could not imagine to build an account entirely focused on the route of a person, because Kampuchea was at the time like a checkerwork of play of failure, with more or less black boxes. The reality of the lived things was different from one area to another. But especially, if I had chosen a party taken to put in images of what would have been a testimony, this one would have appeared artificial to me. Forgery. Because, once again, I did not live this period. I did not want to be to be an illustrator, with the direction first term. The period of the Khmer Rouges is a side of the history of Kampuchea of most obscure. Hermetic by painful moments... absolutely and definitively. I it tower of the thing... but can one is not certain to have made come from there to end ?

-Water and the Earth begin on April 19, 1975, that is to say two days after the fall of Phnom Penh, and only a few days after the end of Dead end and Rouge . We know that you remember this month pertinently in particular but which is the autobiographical share which you integrated into your accounts ?

The history of the young man who sleeps outside with beautiful star with his puppy is a little my own history. When we arrived the embassy, to my mother, my brother, my sister and me, we "had inherited" the puppy that our good had just had. The reds wanted to have it for them. My mother trembles about it still today when it speaks about it. Any share of this account. Then, the other account founder is the long monologue which a teacher carries out who gives up the life... it is the account of died of the father of Rithy Panh that I put in images. The other accounts are articulated around réappropriations of testimonys, of illustrations of an idea... (Acts and consequences)...

-With the reading of Water and the ground , there is the feeling all the same that you remainders still distant with your lived, that you do not approach, or not yet in any case, the things who have you ravaged, things of your intimacy (like the disappearance of your father)... is this an illusion?

By no means. In any of these comic strips there is not a share of autobiography. That will come in its time with an account (already written) which is entitled the Smile of Apsaras . More than one autobiography, this account speaks about my report/ratio to the women of my life. Since my good (the Chinese woman which raised me at the same time as my mother) while passing through my aunts... the search of a smile ultimately. With this account, I will evoke Kampuchea of the Sixties.

-In the same way, even if some of your images are strong, you apparently do not wish to add violence with violence and to take pleasure in settings in scene spectacular or macabre...

I was never very kutchup , just like I had much evil to come to the autobiography. This form is very interesting, but it is all the same something of eminently obscene and which obstructs me. And then, to find the tone right, without being in a mobility which escapes to you request outdistances and reflexion. I am not an incontinent author...

-Water and the Earth are located in a vein plus documentarist but you also avoid falling in the complaint or the teaching demonstration. I imagine that this sensitivity also answers a form of decency ?

Absolutely. There, it is my Kampuchean fibre which speaks. Silence is sometimes more speaking that long and useless chatterings. Water and the Earth are a whole of fragments of life. I frame these narrative moments of reference mark, because I doubt that the readers of today have a very clear vision of this time.

-Graphically, in your way of working, the method that you employ would resemble more the cut-up adapted in data base by Alex Barbier. Is this as you proceed, by assembling a whole of images strong, or judicious, according to your texts, of your monologues ?

I did not await Alex Barbier (read in his time in the pages of monthly Charlie ) to interest me in the cut-up. Major Tom and The Thin White Duke obsessed my neurons since good a long time.
[ The Return Of The Thin White Duke/Throwing darts in lover' S eyes/Here are we, one magical moment/Such is the stuff from where dreams are woven/Benhind sound ; dreding the ocean/Lost in my circle/Here I amndt flashing No color/Tall in this room overlooking the ocean... ]
For Water and the Earth , I was to make with a luggage of obsessing images, accumulated since 1977, of the historical concepts registered in a certain human reality, holes to be filled... I juggled with all these "constraints" to give body to my work.

-We already evoked the violence of certain images. But which use do you make photography and why ?

I am useful myself of photography especially like matter, texture, to give body and reality to the things, outside and interior. The problem with the drawing in comic strip, it is that once that it results in the line alone -- as in the Photographer of Emmanuel Guibert, it does not translate anything other but an asceticism of reality without echoes, without resonance with reality. Its drawings are beautiful, clean, clean until more thirst. They translate what one will want, but certainly not the ground, dust, sweat, Afghan. Blow, the blue of the sky of the Photographer makes me think of blue sky of an adventure of Schtroumpfs , and of nothing other. However, if I is so virulent against Guibert it is because, in other leading circumstances, it proves to be more gifted... and sincere (cf the War of Allan Cope ). A surface approach of the comic strip, its codes and dressings-up of reality. I add that I am also fascinated more by photography. I collect thousands of images, anonymous figures since so much of years which, gradually, take a considerable share in my report/ratio with imaginary...

-" What is infected must be incised, which is rotted must be cut off "... you do not hesitate to enamel your drawn account of quotations like this Khmer Rouge slogan or of quotations extracted from old texts ( Trai Phum ...). There still, which is the direction?

There are two distinct aspects. The quotations of the words of Khmer Rouges are there to point out to us how these people (?) thought, how they perceived the world. I will have to say "perceive", because there is of them even more one... in waiting of a reversal of the direction of the history.
The other quotations are there to mean us that "Angkor" is not the only one to forge the identity of the Khmers. There is an incredibly rich and ignored Kampuchean literature world. Thus, the first quotation which opens the book is not other than a vision khmère of Simbad the sailor . These quotations are also a recall of the philosophy of life of the Kampuchean ones. They are texts exhumed in 1965 per Bernard-Philippe Groslier, conservative of Angkor in the Sixties, and which were not republished to date.

-This carbonaceous impression haunts your comic strips as strongly as the odors and the vibrations of this last time haunt you. In 2003, in the foreword of Dead end and Red , you declared that you were always in search of answers. This Kampuchean period 1975-1979 will not cease feeding your creation...

One never leaves unscathed a genocide, even if I did not live it directly. The report/ratio with the word, the word of the men... to speak is a combat which is needed that I carry out tous.les.jours, counters myself. It is necessary that work on the memory is made to bus too people find their accounts in our guilty silences.
You will read soon Secteur 7 which I have Co-writing with my friend Stephan Polonsky (joint author of Exit of road , PMJ editor), with the Glénat editions, which will not be without pointing out some April 17, 1975, even if the action am held... tomorrow, in Paris and more precisely, the seventh district. The album is scheduled for September 2005.

Water and Earth, Delcourt, Collection Mirages, 14,95 euros. Exit on April 13, 2005.

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This post has been edited by boogie brat: Jun 26 2005, 09:11 PM

[NitaKang]

Rouge, red.

[AidanW]

It's been long...nice artwork. I'll have to look him up to see more of his portfolio. There is another dude in France who is a comic artist. His name is Pierre Mony Chan.
http://sergem.com.free.fr/

[boogie brat]

Hey AidanW! Kinda missed you. (IMG:http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/icon_redface.gif)

That guy has nice artwork! I like the Kalisto stuff, looks interesting.

[digitt]

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he look like my friend