Shanghai Chang Joins Art for Kep: A Residency at the Crossroads of Identity and Movement
- Art for Kep
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
From 20 June 2026, Art for Kep welcomes Shanghai Chang for a one-month residency at the singular setting of Knai Bang Chatt, in Kep. A contemporary artist, filmmaker, and notable co-founder of the Homeless Artists Collective, Shanghai Chang is based in Phnom Penh and works across a wide range of creative disciplines, reflecting a deep engagement with Cambodia's evolving cultural and social landscapes.
His presence in Kep marks a new chapter in the trajectory of a residency programme that is asserting itself, season after season, as one of the most rigorous in the region.
An Artist Rooted in Experimentation
Shanghai Chang is a classically trained textile designer who graduated with a BA in Fashion Design and Photography from Limkokwing University of Creative Technology. But it is at the margins of his academic formation that he forges his own voice. Attracted to photography and film through a fashion photography course at school, he began experimenting artistically. In 2017, he met curator Roger Nelson, who showed him experimental videos from Thailand and Europe — a decisive encounter that led him to pursue a similar path.
The result was immediate and widely noticed. In 2018, he directed his debut experimental short film, Mélancolie (n.), exploring trauma, isolation, memory, loss, and the resilience of the human spirit. The film was selected for its official premiere in the "Cambodia In Shorts" category at the 9th edition of the Cambodia International Film Festival. Its experimental approach also earned it a place in the S-Express programme at SeaShorts Film Festival, leading to its international premiere and screenings across Southeast Asia.
In 2019, Chang directed his second experimental short, Prey Sar, deepening his exploration of societal constraints and personal freedom. The film was selected for the Cambodia Short Films programme at the Phnom Penh International Film Festival, and featured in the 2021 edition of La Fête du court métrage at the Institut français du Cambodge.
His practice extends well beyond cinema. It encompasses experimental and conceptual fashion design, photography, experimental film, video art, and installation. He was also in creative residency at Kon Len Khnom Art Space in 2018. His textile works, inspired by 17th-century European fashion, reach back to his childhood ambition of becoming a ballerina — a challenging dream for a boy from a modest Cambodian family in a society of strongly predetermined gender roles. This tension between belonging and transgression, between heritage and hybridity, runs through the entirety of his work.
The Homeless Artists Collective: Art as Community
Many Sin, Sosoth "Kwan" Sovankong, and Shanghai Chang are the artists behind the Phnom Penh-forged Homeless Artists Collective. Founded in 2018, the group came together around a shared passion for the arts and attending exhibitions. After a year of living together in a creative space, the collective's name emerged from a chance encounter with a noodle shop owner following a talk at Kon Len Khnhom, a community arts space founded by Meta Moeng.
For their second exhibition, 180°, presented at Mirage Contemporary Art Space in Siem Reap, the three artists explored what unites them beyond friendship — their experiences leading a new generation of contemporary artists in Cambodia. The exhibition showcased Shanghai Chang's textiles, KWN23's paintings and Many Sin's steel sculptures and screen prints. The collective embodies a rare dynamic in the local arts landscape: multidisciplinary creation without compromise on conceptual rigour.
Art for Kep: A Programme Coming Into Its Own
The residency Shanghai Chang joins is one of the most ambitious in Cambodia. Art for Kep is structured around three chapters: art, music, and marine conservation and restoration. The programme is chaired by Jef Moons, a Belgian-Khmer citizen who has lived and invested in Cambodia since 2003. Its steering group includes Satcha, the Cambodia International Film Festival, Kep Music City, and Marine Conservation Cambodia.
Residents are housed in renovated former staff quarters on the Knai Bang Chatt grounds, with a studio space, accommodation, meals, and access to the resort's community networks. Artists are selected through a blind judging process by an independent committee comprising Dr. LinDa Saphan, Cambodian-born artist, Fulbright Scholar and cultural historian; Pierre-André Romano, founder of Satcha and the Sar Modern Art Museum in Siem Reap; and Reaksmey Yean, Cambodian curator and co-founder of Silapak Trotchaek Pneik. The committee evaluates applicants on artistic rigour, conceptual clarity, alignment with the residency's values, and the potential for community engagement.
Since its launch, the programme has welcomed a series of distinctive voices. In March 2026, the residency's atelier-gallery housed a photographic survey by Walter Koditek, a German urban planner, author, and photographer based in Siem Reap — whose published works include Hong Kong Modern Architecture of the 1950s-1970s and the Architectural Guide Phnom Penh, co-authored with Moritz Henning — focused on Kep's modernist built heritage, systematically documented through archival research and large-format photography.
A recent cohort included Karona Hoeuy and Kanha Hul. Hoeuy, a visual artist from Siem Reap who began painting as a teenager and studied at Phare Ponleu Selpak, became captivated by the crab traps he observed along the coastline — green-netted structures covered in plastic with marine life growing inside — which became the animating subject of a series of paintings produced during his residency. Kanha Hul, born in 1999 and a member of the Siem Reap-based Open Studio Cambodia collective since 2019, works across photography, performance, painting, collage and installation. In Kep, she focused on the fishing communities along the coast, experimenting with recycled paper and photo transfer to capture the movement of water.
And it was also in Kep that French writer Emmanuel Pézard spent months writing from within the very landscape he was reconstructing on the page — a strange loop of memory and invention, where the ruins outside his window became the stage for twelve short stories spanning a century of Cambodian history.
Kep as Mirror
For Shanghai Chang — whose work consistently interrogates identity, displacement, and cultural hybridity — Kep offers a terrain of particular richness. Kep is a small coastal town in southern Cambodia, set against the Gulf of Thailand. Under French colonial rule it served as the country's premier seaside retreat, and the modernist villas erected here in the 1950s, part of the New Khmer Architecture movement pioneered by Vann Molyvann, lent the town an architectural distinction that few places in Cambodia could claim. The Khmer Rouge drove its inhabitants out during the 1970s, and most of those structures were left abandoned or severely damaged. Many remain in ruins.
This palimpsest of memories — colonial, royal, traumatic, slowly renewing — is precisely the kind of territory where Shanghai Chang's practice can find its full measure. Photographer, filmmaker, conceptual designer: he arrives in Kep with multiple tools and one enduring question — what does it mean to move between cultures, bodies, and times?
Art for Kep, and with it Knai Bang Chatt, continues to weave a conversation between artists from very different horizons and a place that has never stopped bearing the marks of its own transformations.
Shanghai Chang is in residence at Art for Kep / Knai Bang Chatt from 20 June 2026.
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