Painting My Way Into A Community
Sometimes the places you dream of joining quietly become the places you belong.
By Cheerted Keo
Community · Identity · 7 min read
Before I ever lived in Cambodia, I followed its creative scene from a distance.
While living in the Netherlands, I kept coming across photos and videos of murals appearing across Phnom Penh. Artists painting side by side, festivals bringing walls to life and public spaces slowly transforming into open-air galleries. It felt like a new creative movement was beginning to take shape.
What drew me in wasn’t just the artwork itself. It was the feeling that Cambodia’s contemporary street art scene was finding its own voice.
Street culture had already shaped much of my own upbringing. Hip-hop, graffiti, rap and breakdance were a big part of my youth in the Netherlands, so seeing those same influences emerge in Cambodia immediately caught my attention. It made me wonder what it would be like to contribute to that growing scene instead of simply watching it from afar.
At the time, it felt like a distant possibility.
A few years later, I found myself living in Phnom Penh.
Becoming Part Of The Scene
Cambodia’s art community is relatively small. One of the things I quickly came to appreciate is how easily people cross paths. Artists, designers, photographers and musicians often know one another, and collaborations seem to happen naturally.
During my first two years here, I spent much of my time getting to know that community. I visited exhibitions, met other artists, spent time in studios and slowly built relationships.
Eventually, I was invited to take part in a new mural festival.
It would become the first edition of Murals for Cambodia, an international festival bringing together local and international artists to paint across Phnom Penh.
Then came the question:
Would I like to paint as well?
Looking back, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Cambodia’s art scene is still relatively small, and by then I had become an active part of it. Still, receiving that invitation felt special.
Years earlier I had been looking at Cambodian mural festivals through a screen from the Netherlands.
Now I wasn’t looking anymore.
I was in one.
Choosing The Right Mural
When I received the invitation, I ran into a practical problem.
I didn’t really have a finished piece that felt right for a mural.
Most of my personal work at the time consisted of studies rather than complete artworks. That year, I had challenged myself to paint 365 oil paintings, one every day for a year, as a way to improve my painting skills. Nearly all of them were studies of the human body, a subject I had become fascinated by. It was a great exercise, but not exactly the kind of work that suited a mural festival.
So I went back to an older illustration I had made earlier in the Netherlands.
It was called Noodle Rain.
Around that time, I enjoyed taking ordinary objects and looking for unexpected ways to use them. I was especially interested in simple kitchen utensils and how changing one small visual relationship could completely transform an image.
The idea behind Noodle Rain was straightforward.
A pair of chopsticks reaches into the rain.
As the raindrops are picked up, they become noodles.
That’s it.
There isn’t a hidden meaning or a deeper story. I simply liked creating images that made people stop for a second and think, Wait… that’s impossible.
Looking back, it turned out to be the right choice.
The bold, graphic composition translated naturally onto a large wall, and for one of my first murals, it was a forgiving design to work with.
Discoverying A Global Community
Until that week, I thought mural festivals were simply local events.
A city organises a festival, invites a few artists, everyone paints for a couple of days, and that’s the end of it.
I quickly realised there was an entire world behind it.
Artists had travelled from across Asia and Europe to paint in Phnom Penh. As I got to know them, I discovered that many had been doing this for years. One festival led to another. Someone you met in Cambodia might invite you to paint in Japan a few months later, or recommend you for a festival somewhere else in the world.
Many of the artists already knew each other. They had painted together before, shared techniques, exchanged stories and kept meeting again in different countries.
I hadn’t realised mural festivals worked like that.
Until then, I saw them as individual events.
Instead, I discovered they were part of an international community.
That was probably one of the biggest things I took away from the festival. It showed me there was an entire side of being a mural artist that I had never considered. You don’t just paint walls. You become part of a network of people who travel, collaborate and keep opening doors for one another.
It completely changed the way I looked at mural festivals.
More Than Just Murals
The festival itself lasted only a few days.
There was live music, artist talks and plenty of conversations that continued long after the painting had stopped. Between working on the wall, I picked up practical things too: different ways of scaling artwork, new painting techniques and the many different paths that had brought each artist into this profession.
But that’s not what stayed with me most.
What stayed with me was seeing what events like this can do for a creative community.
Street art didn’t start in Cambodia. Like hip-hop, graffiti and many other contemporary art forms, it arrived from somewhere else. But that doesn’t make it any less meaningful here.
I think many young Cambodians grow up seeing these events online. They see artists painting in cities around the world and naturally want to experience that in their own country as well.
Festivals like this make that possible.
They bring international artists into Cambodia while giving local artists the chance to meet people they might never have crossed paths with otherwise. Ideas are exchanged, friendships are formed and, sometimes, new opportunities appear long after the festival has ended.
I hope Cambodia continues creating spaces like these.
Not only because they produce beautiful murals, but because they help build a creative community that becomes stronger every time people come together.
Looking back, the mural was only part of the experience.
Becoming part of the community was the part I had quietly hoped for all along.
