Painted in London but likely depicting a scene recalled from Qatar, this work portrays a bustling sea port at the moment when a cargo ship has arrived. The compositional emphasis on reaching hands of the gathered crowd waiting at the dock evokes a sense of desperation and struggle. The presence of the Red Cross and United Nations logos, and of the recurrent motif of the bird as a symbol of freedom, indicate the artist’s growing engagement with depicting current political events in his work from this period. You Khin (b. 1947, Cambodia; d. 2009, Cambodia) is believed to be the only Cambodian artist who was actively exhibiting before the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge period, who continued to professionally practice and exhibit during the ensuing decades. His work from the 1970s onwards has been consistently engaged with a cubist-like style of semi-abstraction, and with depicting urban scenes, often with an unsentimental focus on migrants and poverty as subject matter. Khin's biography is defined by his travels: living and working in Cambodia until 1973, then in France until 1977, then in Sudan until 1979, then in the Ivory Coast until 1981, then in Qatar until 1999, then in London until 2004, then in Cambodia until his death in 2009.
