Painting Pol Pot.

Byline: Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop

Cambodian artists of all ages depict the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime in vastly different ways.

Cambodian artist Oeur Sokuntevy, 25, was born after the atrocities of Pol Pot's regime. So when she was asked to produce an artwork for an exhibition looking back at that period, she struggled; Pol Pot and the legacy of his rule are not discussed much by her generation. "It's sad, but it's in the past," she says. "Everybody has a sad story. It's time to move on."

In the end, Oeur painted "I Am Too Young to Understand These Words," a watercolor of a young girl in a bathing suit talking on her mobile phone beside a phrase reproduced from Pol Pot's "Little Red Book," extolling the regime's aims. Her painting stands in sharp contrast to "The Khmer Rouge Leader," a painting by Hen Sophal, 50, who depicts a grinning Pol Pot seated like an emperor atop a mountain of bones and skulls. Amid the macabre pile, a monk's torn saffron robe represents the regime's destruction of religion, and an Angkorean-carved stone its disregard for the country's ancient culture.

These two works represent the divergent perspectives of different generations of Cambodians on Pol Pot and his killing fields, and lie at the heart of "Art of Survival," a group exhibition at the contemporary art space Meta House in Phnom Penh. The exhibit is a "long-overdue dialogue through art" that seeks to address modern memories of Cambodia's painful past, says Meta House director Nico Mesterharm. The two-part exhibition began in January with 21 artists and expanded this month to include a total of 40 artists, who were each given a blank canvas to document their reflections on the Khmer Rouge period. The show was scheduled to coincide with current efforts to bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to justice through a U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal, which is preparing for its first trial--of Kaing Guek Eac, the former commander of the notorious S-21 prison and torture center--next month.

The exhibit includes international artists such as Vietnamese-Khmer painter Le Huy Hoang, who painted a portrait of his father, a Cambodian military doctor who died in one of Pol Pot's detention camps, and the American Bradford Edwards, who has regularly traveled to Cambodia over the past 12 years. "We're trying to show the impact of the genocide not just on Cambodia but on the region as well," says Lydia Parusol, art manager of Meta House.

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge presided over the deaths of almost 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. But their presence was felt ...