Leang Seckon's Flowering Parachute Skirt will be the centrepiece of a public peace gathering at Columbia University this Wednesday, 1 May. Involving both Vietnamese and Cambodian survivors of the Vietnam War as well as U.S. veterans, the event will take place at 5pm on the lawn outside Buell Hall and will be open to the general public.

Flowering Parachute Skirt was created by Leang Seckon partially from a military parachute which fell onto his village during the U.S. bombings of Cambodia and which had been kept in the village's Buddhist temple for 40 years. Brought out only on certain occasions its lack of use had helped preserve it. The body of the figure, which rises up menacingly from the incongruous, flowing skirt, was created from a collage of materials evoking a military officer. It was during a workshop with women from New York's Khmer and Vietnamese community that the parachute was transformed by being decorated with dozens of flowers cut from sarongs from Seckon’s home village as well as from fabrics given by the Cambodian-American community in the Bronx. This starkly moving work now resembles a fantastical, sexless, soldier, with the billowing, flowery skirt of the parachute undercutting the figure’s stiffly, formal pose.

Arn Chorn-Pond, genocide survivor and founder of Cambodian Living Arts, will join Seckon, along with other survivors and U.S. veterans, in a ritual aimed to help heal both groups from the traumas of that war.

“By adding beauty to this object of war, I hope to transform it into an instrument of peace and healing” - Leang Seckon

Leang Seckon is currently in New York on a three-week residency at the Bronx Museum of the Arts as part of the Season of Cambodia Festival. Works by Vann Nath, Séra, and other emerging Cambodian artists, which often deal with the US bombings and the Khmer Rouge genocide, will also be displayed as part of the Festival exhibition.

Image: © Leang Seckon, Rossi & Rossi