A cross to bear from an evil time

By LINDA HERRICK

Cambodian-born artist Lang Ea can remember very little about her early life. Small wonder, when her family was forced from their village into a Khmer Rouge work camp when she was just six months old. It was 1975, "year Zero" of Pol Pot's rule of terror and "the beginning of the end of the age of machines".

The family struggled to survive for four years, her father doing everything possible to conceal his Chinese bloodline at a perilous time when the wealthy, the educated and the Chinese were being killed by the thousands in Cambodia's "Killing Fields". Food was so short, cannibalism was not uncommon.

Then, when the Vietnamese Army "liberated" the camp in 1979, Lang's family fled across the border to Thailand, where the reception was far from welcoming.

"From what my parents have told me, the Thai officials were scared of the Pol Pot regime and scared of invasion," says Lang, now aged 28 and based in Auckland. "There were thousands of refugees at this border and they were calling out names of families to get on buses to go to the airport to fly to western nations. But there was one day left before the camp was closed and we missed out.

"They wanted to teach those of us who were left a lesson. They put us on a bus and dumped us at the top of a cliff in a forest-mountain area right on the border of Cambodia.

"With guns, they made us go down the cliff but it was mined. We saw so many people dead, who had been forced to come down before us. We sat there for about a week, not moving. Luckily, the Vietnamese came through and marked where to walk safely."

But their ordeal was far from over. Lang's family walked through the fighting to their village of Battambang, in northwest Cambodia, but they were thrown out as they were no longer on the "official" list of residents.

So it was back to a Red Cross camp on the Thai border, which was highly unstable because of the war sweeping the region. Eventually, the family found haven at the Khao-I-Dang Red Cross Camp, where they stayed for nearly three years before being sponsored to New Zealand.

After some time at the Mangere refugee centre, they moved to Upper Hutt where they had relatives. Lang (pronounced "Larn") was just 8 and could speak no English. "I went to Oxford Crescent School in Upper Hutt where they discovered I could draw very well. As soon as I started school my art work came through much more than anything else."

On leaving Heretaunga High, Lang did a graphic design degree, with specialties in architecture and design, at Wellington Polytechnic, and now works as a freelance commercial artist and website designer. But her paintings are her real passion.

A few years ago, some impulse inspired her to start work on a series of large, abstract oils which have metamorphosed into a 12-part Red Cross Series, drawn, she believes, on the subconscious memories of those horrendous years in Cambodia and on her reflections on war in general. The series is on display at the Aotea Centre for the next two weeks to mark the annual New Zealand Red Cross appeal.

"The painting started when the Bosnian war came on and I did this painting [which shows the region with fractured borders]. Maybe it was the memory of a time of confusion when I see these images of war on TV and in the paper. Maybe the memories came back and I needed to do the painting."

Lang sees her work as storytelling, with symbols such as barbed wire, aggressive mosquitoes on the attack, the entrapment of lines, the brutality of colours like red and black. On the positive side, the Red Cross symbol offers a beacon of aid, and the lightening of the images at the end of the series indicates some hope.

Lang visited Cambodia in 2000, halfway through painting the series. "As you get older you want to feel you belong somewhere and I don't remember that part of my life, so I thought if I went back, there might be something. But nothing came back.

"It's interesting to me that I did this series before I went back, so maybe I was drawing that time of my life. The feelings I have about the experience I had as a child definitely came from war. That war is in there, it confuses me a bit."

Lang offered prints of the series to the Red Cross to use as cards for their appeal. "They asked me why I had used the crosses, so when I told them about my childhood they were fascinated. They have heard so many stories but I am not so good at telling them. I have put mine on canvas."

* The Red Cross Series, by Lang Ea, Aotea Centre, from today until March 6.