Phnom Penh Street Art: A City That Started Painting in 2015

Phnom Penh is not an obvious street-art city, which is exactly why the scene here is worth an afternoon.

Cambodia lost most of a generation of artists between 1975 and 1979. The Khmer Rouge targeted the educated and the creative specifically, and the classical arts - Apsara dance, shadow puppetry, silk weaving - were rebuilt after 1979 from the handful of practitioners who survived. That rebuilding is the dominant story of Cambodian culture for forty years, and it is a story about recovering the past.

Street art is the first significant Cambodian art form that is not about recovery. It arrived properly around 2015, it is largely made by Cambodians in their twenties and thirties, and a lot of it is not about the Khmer Rouge at all - it is about the city now, about development, about the river, about ordinary people.

Some of it is about the history, and when it is, it is oblique rather than literal in a way the memorials cannot be.

You will find work on shophouse gables, on the blind walls of new construction, in the lanes behind the riverfront, and on the shutters of businesses that only show it when they are closed - which is one reason to walk this in the evening.

The scene is concentrated rather than scattered, which makes it walkable.

The lanes off Sisowath Quay. Step one street back from the riverfront promenade and the side alleys between the quay and Street 19 carry a lot of work. This is the densest area and the easiest to do on foot.

Around the old White Building site. The White Building was a 1963 low-cost housing block by the New Khmer Architecture movement, home to hundreds of artists and musicians, and one of the most photographed buildings in the city. It was demolished in 2017. The area around where it stood remains a centre of gravity for the scene, and some of the work there is directly about its loss.

Street 93 and 95 and the lanes around Boeung Keng Kang, where several galleries and studios sit among the murals.

Toul Tom Poung, around the Russian Market, where shop shutters carry a lot of smaller work.

New construction hoardings anywhere in the centre. Phnom Penh is building fast and the hoardings get painted, which means the scene turns over - a wall you photograph this year may be gone next.

A guided tuk-tuk run is genuinely worth it here, more than for most things. The work moves, the good pieces are in lanes you would not turn down, and the guides know which artist did what.

Half the pleasure of walking for murals is what you walk past, and Phnom Penh has two architectural layers most visitors never notice.

French colonial shophouses, roughly 1900 to 1940, with shuttered upper floors and arcaded walkways, line whole blocks of the old centre. Many are derelict, some are beautifully restored, and they are the canvas a lot of the street art is painted on.

New Khmer Architecture is the one worth learning to spot. Between independence in 1953 and 1970, under Sihanouk, Cambodian architects - above all Vann Molyvann - built a modernism that was genuinely its own: raised floors for airflow, deep overhangs and brise-soleil for the sun, ponds for cooling, and forms drawn from Angkorian geometry. It is one of the most interesting bodies of mid-century architecture anywhere and it is disappearing to development.

What survives in the centre: the Independence Monument (1958), a lotus-shaped tower by Vann Molyvann that is best seen lit at night; the Chaktomuk Conference Hall on the riverfront, fan-shaped and facing the confluence; and the National Sports Complex, still extraordinary.

The Central Market's art deco dome, 1937, is a different era again and was briefly one of the largest domed structures in Asia.

Go from about four. The light is better, the heat has broken, and the shutters with work on them start coming down as businesses close.

Pair it with food. This is the standard and correct combination, and most tuk-tuk tours here do both: murals while the light is good, eating as it goes, then the river. Phnom Penh's street food is a morning and evening thing - see the food and markets guide - so an afternoon that ends in eating works with the city's own rhythm.

Finish on the water. An hour on the Mekong at sunset costs very little and is the best way to understand why a capital is here at all, where three rivers meet.

By tuk-tuk rather than on foot if you want range - the city is flat but spread out, and four hours by tuk-tuk covers what a day on foot would not.

Photography. Ask before photographing people, and be aware that some walls are on private property where the owner commissioned the work. Nobody minds a photograph of a wall.

Buying. Several of the artists sell through galleries around Street 240 and Boeung Keng Kang, and there are Cambodian-run print shops where the money goes to the artist rather than a middleman. Worth asking a guide.