Inspired from my own family’s objects, the kettle and buried family photos which my mother had tried to save during the regime, I started this project “Alive” from my own family’s memory in 2014. After that I decided to expand it to other Cambodian families living inside Cambodia and then Cambodian diasporas who left their homeland to live at different parts of the world after the conflict by using photography as a means to capture the memory of human history. Most of the objects featured in my photography have been used by families before the war, during the Khmer Rouge regime, at the border camps, and then traveled on a long journey with the victims and survivors to new lands in the host countries and continued to be used as everyday items. Each photograph has a clue that leads to a true story behind each individual object. The objects have been reclaimed, digging them out of the dirty land after the Pol Pot period, or they have been kept throughout the families’ lives.

ーKim Hak