Visions of Siem Reap by...Rémi Abad: 'Tenderness'

May 2020, at the start of the global pandemic. Two men driving on a motorbike pass by a tagged wall in Siem Reap. ​“Whoever is Happy Will Make Others Happy Too”, claim the hand painted letters. They smile this ineffable ​“Cambodian smile” that have been endlessly commented. The photographer captures this moment of grace.

Rémi Abad has selected candid photographs taken around Siem Reap town and Angkor Archaeological Park from 2017 to 2024, all expressing what we call ​‘tenderness’, a term that is difficult to translate into Khmer, perhaps because it encompasses the whole ​“Cambodianess”. ​“It is all about the way people interact here,” explains Abad; ​“there is not a day that doesn’t bring me, while I’m walking or riding my bike, a scene, an image of what it really is life in Cambodia, something that I didn’t feel in any other country around this world, something that brings a smile to me, too.”

These images do not need captions. We just left the ID codes used by the photographer in his archive. They do not need thematic organization, since the same delicate caring can be captured in the hand of a make-up artist getting a dancer ready, or in two schoolgirls taking cover from the rain together, or in these two fishermen joining hands on the Tonle Sap Lake.

The loving glance of a mother to her child, of a bride posing for pre-wedding photos near the ancient Khmer temples, of two lovers cuddling on the shore of Angkor Wat moat, is naturally full of tenderness. Yet the caring attention given to a sculpture or to an elephant also expresses love. This impalpable yet profund connection to nature and to the surnatural can be linked to religious beliefs, to ancestral traditions. It is essentially, tenderly Cambodian.