Cambodian Shanghai Chang: the art of weaving identities
- Art for Kep
- Jul 2
- 4 min read
In residence in Kep since June 20, photographer, filmmaker and fashion designer Shanghai Chang is shaping a conceptual fashion piece out of debris gathered along the coast. Portrait of a Phnom Penh-born artist who has made indiscipline his method.
A piece born of the sea's debris
Every day, Shanghai Chang walks Kep in search of material: stranded fishing nets, rope, plastic tossed up by the tide — everything the sea and the local fishing economy leave behind on the sand. He also watches the town itself: the people, how they live, the materials they use day to day. Out of these outings comes the project he is developing during his residency: a conceptual, avant-garde fashion piece made entirely from ocean debris.
The process, he says, takes up the whole week: studying the material, testing what holds and what breaks, sketching, starting over. Nothing is settled yet. "This is the best residency to be at," he says, praising a setting he considers ideal for Cambodian and international artists alike, a team that has treated him as a guest from day one, and support — from management down to the kitchen — that has let him focus fully on his work. He says he is aware of his luck at having been selected.
A calling with no role model
Thirty years old, born in Phnom Penh, the youngest of five siblings. As a child, he didn't even know fashion design existed as a profession: you sew clothes, he thought, you don't invent them. He studied fashion design and photography at Limkokwing University. By the time he graduated, ten years ago, there was no local figure to look up to — the profession barely existed in Cambodia. He considers himself part of the country's very first generation of designers, in an economy where the kingdom, one of the world's largest exporters of cheap garments, left no room for a local designer brand. Sell abroad or disappear: that was, at the time, the only horizon.
A detour through the image
A fashion photography class, taken almost by accident, led him elsewhere. In 2017, curator Roger Nelson introduced him to experimental films from Thailand and Europe. The following year, he made Mélancolie (n.), a short film about trauma, isolation and memory, selected in the Cambodia In Shorts category of the Cambodia International Film Festival, then screened at the SeaShorts Film Festival, with showings across Southeast Asia. In 2019, he made a second short film, Prey Sar, shown at the Phnom Penh International Film Festival and, in 2021, at the Institut français du Cambodge.
The Homeless Artists Collective
Shortly after his start in film, Shanghai Chang co-founded the Homeless Artists Collective with Many Sin and Sosoth "Kwan" Sovankong, in 2018 in Phnom Penh. The name came out of a chance encounter with a noodle seller, after a discussion held at Kon Len Khnhom, the community art space run by Meta Moeng. The collective would last eight years. For its second exhibition, "180°," at the Mirage Contemporary Art Space in Siem Reap, the three artists showed their textiles, paintings and sculptures side by side — a rarity in the local art scene, where cross-disciplinary work is rarely paired with this level of conceptual rigor.
Creating, not producing
"It's in my upbringing, it's in my DNA." His mother sewed. So did his grandfather.
Sewing is a thread he has never quite let go of. What interests him isn't mass production, which he finds repetitive, but experimentation: making something new out of materials one thought were already familiar. His textile pieces, drawing on 17th-century European fashion, extend an unlikely childhood dream for a boy from a modest Cambodian family — becoming a ballet dancer. That tension between heritage and hybridity runs through all his work, from garments to installation. He also completed a residency at the Kon Len Khnhom Art Space in 2018. A first fiction feature, meanwhile, remains a project for "someday."
Kep as a mirror
His residency is part of the Art for Kep program, hosted at the Knai Bang Chatt estate and structured around three strands — art, music and marine conservation. It is chaired by Jef Moons, who has been based in Cambodia since 2003, with a steering committee bringing together Satcha, the Cambodia International Film Festival, Kep Music City and Marine Conservation Cambodia. Residents stay in the estate's renovated rooms, with a studio, accommodation, meals and access to the complex's networks. Selection is handled by an independent panel: Dr LinDa Saphan, artist and cultural historian, Pierre-André Romano, founder of Satcha and of the Sar Modern Art Museum in Siem Reap, and Reaksmey Yean, Cambodian curator and co-founder of Silapak Trotchaek Pneik.
Before him, the residency's gallery-studio hosted, in March 2026, a photographic project by Walter Koditek on Kep's modernist heritage. A more recent cohort brought together Karona Hoeuy, who focused on crab traps overtaken by marine life, and Kanha Hul, who worked on fishing communities using recycled paper. French writer Emmanuel Pézard, for his part, spent several months in Kep writing twelve short stories spanning a century of Cambodian history.
Under the French protectorate, this small seaside town on the Gulf of Thailand was the country's favored resort. The modernist villas built there in the 1950s gave it an architectural distinction rare in Cambodia, before the Khmer Rouge drove out its residents in the 1970s. Many remain in ruins today. It is in this setting that Shanghai Chang is developing a piece that, like the rest of his work, questions identity and displacement.
No detour
Asked, half-serious and half-amused, what he wants to become, Shanghai Chang answers without hesitation: rich. Not rich and famous — just rich, enough to keep creating and make a living from it. Refusing the brand, refusing the factory, refusing to choose between disciplines: it's the same logic that, in Kep, turns debris into clothing.
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