How a chance arrival in Cambodia turned into a decade-long love affair with the camera — and why Kep's fishermen, market vendors and craftsmen are her latest subject.

From 4 August 2026, artist Anya Minko will take up a two-week residency at Art for Kep, turning her attention from the rivers and forests she has painted for years to the salt air, tides and fishing villages of Cambodia's south coast.

Three weeks into his residency at Knai Bang Chatt, composer and animator James Speck has taken his Mississippi-meets-Mekong project out of the studio and into a Kampot music shop, working through arrangements with local players ahead of the piece's first performance.

Saturday, July 18, 2026, from 6pm, The Wave hosts “Melody & Joe,” a music night presented by Art for Kep pairing a rising voice of Cambodia's pop-jazz scene with the vintage guitar sound of a British musician based in Phnom Penh.

As his one-month residency at Knai Bang Chatt draws to a close, textile designer, filmmaker and Homeless Artists Collective co-founder Shanghai Chang will present the results of his stay at Art for Kep on 18–19 July: sculptural busts in dyed textile, rising from voluminous woven skirts, that carry his recurring questions of identity, hybridity and transformation into three dimensions for the first time.

Ten years ago, the Kep archipelago was an exhausted sea: seagrass meadows ploughed under, dugongs gone, dolphins reduced to rumour. Today that same sea carries an international label, a quarter of a vast national restoration plan is already deployed, and fishermen are watching species they thought lost for good come back. A look back at two decades of stubborn work that turned this forgotten corner of the gulf into one of Southeast Asia's finest marine conservation success st

One name keeps coming up on Phnom Penh's music scene: Arôme Khmer. This fusion band draws on Cambodia's golden era to craft a sound that is thoroughly contemporary, one that appeals equally to fans of Khmer psychedelic rock and to lovers of world music — and it is also a regular presence on the Kep West stage, where it performs once a month.

James Speck built a career out of being early to new mediums. Now, a month into a residency at Knai Bang Chatt, he's writing a piece of music that puts the Mississippi and the Mekong in the same room.

Since 6 July, Belgian photographer Aurélie Fischer has been staying at Knai Bang Chatt, in Kep, for a one-month residency organised by Art for Kep. Through the monsoon season, she explores the connections between landscape, labour and identity.

From the banks of Pakistan’s dying River Ravi to the fishing communities of Kep, Alina Mehood spent her Art for Kep residency tracing what disappears when water disappears — and found, in Cambodia’s coastal dances, an unexpected echo of home.

n 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.

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.

Alexandra Maul did not come to Kep to paint. She came to remember why she paints.

Kep-sur-Mer was once a dream made concrete. Modernist villas rising from the jungle above a silken Gulf. French colonists and Khmer royalty. Prince Sihanouk shooting films in golden light. Then, almost overnight, the rockets came. And the silence that followed lasted decades — a silence inhabited only by ghosts, roots, and the sea. Emmanuel Pézard in Residency with Art For Kep It is into this silence that French writer Emmanuel Pézard has stepped. In residence at Knai Bang Ch