The story behind the image:

This polyptych painting installation was executed in coordination with Sleng Genocide Museum and Yale Genocide Project. They generously provided countless materials and photographs to utilize as authentic painting references. From among hundreds of photos, I selected 30 young prisoners who were awaiting execution.

The display speaks to documented cruelties these unfortunate subjects had to tolerate at the hands of their vicious captor Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, in the S-22 Tuol Sleng torture chamber and prison, formerly the high school in which he taught.

Comrade Duch was part of the ultra-communist clique, the Khmer Rouge, that turned Cambodia into a vast slave labor camp and charnel house in which 1.7 million innocent victims sufferingly died of starvation, disease and cruel executions.

My painting of Comrade Duch was based on the original photograph taken in Cambodia by renown photographer Stuart Isset when he came upon Duch in Western Cambodia. My painting of Duch is positioned as an unattached color portrait hovering over his victims attached to one other via monochromatic tones and steel braces. This was done to emphasize his depraved and indifferent dominance over these 30 young people who were among 14,000 tortured and killed on his orders, each scheduled to die on pre-assigned days.

When the Vietnamese crossed the Cambodian border, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, ordered Comrade Duch to free the remaining prisoners. Instead, he murdered every captive innocent in S-22.

He has since been arrested and tried, due to the extraordinary efforts of Nic Dunlop, author of The Lost Executioner and Stuart Isset who heroically tracked Comrade Duch down and turned him in to Cambodian authorities. (Duch was arrested, hiding in the dense jungles and posing as a church pastor.)

Shortly thereafter, I was graciously granted access to Issac's photos of Kaing Guek Eav (Duch) to paint. Duch's light sentence was a crime in of itself, amounting to merely eleven hours for every innocent life he viciously destroyed.

This one year project was emotionally devastating to paint. What each of these poor young souls had to endure...