Chath pierSath

Cambodian American poet and painter who divides his time between a Massachusetts farm and Cambodia.

Creator details
Also known as	Chath Piersath
Roles	Author; Visual artist
Active	since 1994
Based in	United States
Subjects	Land, Place & Environment; Literature & Storytelling; Migration & Diaspora; Visual Arts & Design

Chath pierSath is a Cambodian American poet, painter and writer who lives and works on a small family farm in central Massachusetts. He has spent part of each year in Phnom Penh, and he has worked as a volunteer humanitarian worker. His poetry deals with displacement, war, rural poverty and separated relatives.

Life

Chath pierSath was born in Battambang Province. In 1979, at the end of the Khmer Rouge period, he crossed the Thai-Cambodian border and went to Aranyaprathet Refugee Camp. He came to the United States as a child refugee in 1981 and settled first in Colorado, in Boulder, or in Denver.

He went to college in California and graduated from World College West, later New College of California, in Petaluma, with a B.A. in international service and development. In 1994 he returned to Cambodia as a volunteer with the Cambodian American National Development Organization (CANDO). There he was assigned to help a local human rights group, Human Rights Vigilance of Cambodia, and he also helped local groups working on HIV/AIDS prevention education and children's rights.

In 2001 he received an M.A. in community social psychology from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His master's thesis, completed in 2000, is titled Coping Methods: Personal and Community Resources Used among Cambodians in Cambodia and Cambodian-Americans in Lowell, Massachusetts. For it he interviewed eleven caregivers in Cambodia and six providers in Lowell. The thesis names counseling, Buddhist faith healing, Western medicine, education, support groups, and artistic and cultural expression as ways Cambodians coped with trauma and stress, and it found that a mix of Western and traditional healing helped.

He lived in Lowell for eight years. He calls himself a community social psychologist, and much of his social work has helped people recover from addiction and trauma. He also has a day job in agriculture that supports his art, and he has spent part of each year in Sorya, in Cambodia, helping the community there.

Career

He has worked in education and youth development as an associate manager for the GEAR-UP program in Lowell. His creative practice also includes acting, and through writing and painting his work tells the story of Cambodia's wartime history and the rebuilding of its culture.

Writing

His poem "A Letter to My Mother" was published by Yale University Press in 1997, and it appears in Children of the Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors, compiled by Dith Pran. Other work has appeared in anthologies from the Merrimack Valley Press of Lowell. He writes in English, his second language.

His books include After: a book of poetry (Abingdon Square Publishing, October 15, 2009) and a children's book, Sinat and the Instrument of the Heart (Soundprints). This Body Mystery: paintings and poems (Abingdon Square Publishing, 2012) combines poems with about twenty paintings and centers on people with AIDS in Cambodia in the 1990s. The book was more than ten years in the making.

On Earth Beneath Sky: Poems and Sketches looks at inequality and the divide between city and countryside in Cambodia. In "The New Cambodia" he sets livestock tied to motorbikes beside Range Rovers. "Campuchea" and "Sorya the Sun" turn to rural poverty, land grabbing, hunger and disease in his home province of Battambang, and "The Way I Want to Remember My Cambodia" looks back at a childhood broken off in the late 1970s. His website carries the line "There are many ways to be human, as there are many ways to be Cambodian."

Echoes Lost to Wind (2023), introduced by Jinx Davis, is his fourth collection. Its poems deal with war, death and freedom, with love, loneliness and same-sex desire, and with a Cambodia changed by modern life, foreign organizations and political power.

On March 21, 2025, at Khmer Literary Arts Day in Lowell, he read from On Earth Beneath Sky and led the poetry workshop. In July 2026 Carbonation Press published "12 or 20 (second series) questions with Chath pierSath" by Greg Bem.

Art

He began painting in 2000. He paints large and small portraits of people from memory, often showing the social and economic gaps among Cambodians. His exhibitions at the Java Cafe in Phnom Penh, and in Bangkok and Kunming, dealt with people living with HIV and AIDS. His move to the Lowell area led to a large body of paintings, collages and other tactile art, and his paintings have been shown in Europe, Asia and North America.

With the artist Mary Oestereicher Hamill he developed an oral-history art project about Cambodian war widows, starting with the women of his village, Kop Nymit. The project uses cyanotype designs on pillowcases to keep the memory of the women's husbands, and he planned to teach the women the process. The Cambodian War Widows' Project presented artwork by 14 widows in Sorya. Several volumes of his poetry were part of the exhibition After Genocide: Collected Stories.

In November and December 2024 he worked with the Turkish artist Kutluğ Ataman on Snow White, a performance at Niru Ratnam Gallery in London about trauma and identity in relation to Cambodia's civil war. Directed by Ataman, it takes place in a small room of unstretched canvas. Inside, pierSath makes small puppets from the canvas to stand for his family and what he lived through, using the fairy tale as a loose frame before setting it aside.

Selected paintings and drawings:

• Images to a Dream, oil and acrylic on canvas, 89 by 117 cm (35 by 46 in)
• Journey (2001), oil and acrylic on canvas, 130 by 117 cm (51 by 46 in)
• Self Portrait (2001), ink on paper, 25 by 117 cm (10 by 46 in)
• Dream (2001), ink on brown paper, 28 by 58 cm (11 by 23 in)
• The Spirits (2001), ink and watercolor on paper, 42 by 57 cm (16.5 by 22.5 in)
• Triptych (2002), acrylic on wood, 48 by 70 cm (19 by 27.5 in)
• Poverty, Landmines, and Prostitution (2002), colored pencil on paper, 36 by 43 cm (14 by 17 in)
• In Search of a Different Faith (2002), colored pencil on paper, 36 by 43 cm (14 by 17 in)

He is included in the Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists: Artists of the American Mosaic (2007).

Works

• On Earth Beneath Sky (Book)
• This Body Mystery (Book)

See also

• Dith Pran
• All creators

References