“Sopheak Sam is a remarkable artist whose work unpicks complex histories, forms of memory, and the translation between ritual and space. I’m deeply excited to see how Sopheak continues to expand their practice, through new techniques and approaches to design an exploration of mediums.” – juror Joseph Henry, Director of Cultural Planning, City of Boston, Office of Arts and Culture

“Sopheak Sam’s personal life journey has been a source of inspiration for his layered installations and hybrid aesthetic that he describes as the ‘afterlives of refugeehood.” – juror Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, ICA Boston

Sopheak Sam (b. Khao-I-Dang, Thailand) is a Cambodian-American queer artist and former child refugee whose sensuous and spatial interventions distill postwar intimacies. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo and group presentations at Kalm Village, Chiang Mai, Thailand; the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St Paul, MN; Factory Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Boston CyberArts and Distillery Gallery, Boston, MA. Sam holds an MFA from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and received a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship in 2022 for research on the Thai-Cambodian border.

Drawing from history and family records, Sam pieces fragmentary memories into material and spatial forms. Their work scaffolds the vernacular and the everyday into layered, ornamental thresholds, stuck in an unsettled space between insider and outsider. Often unfolding as room-scale, mixed media installations, their interdisciplinary projects use mimicry and autoethnography to trace the afterlives and afterimages of Cambodian refugeehood.