Pacita Abad’s Flight to Freedom grew from her encounters with Cambodian refugees near the Thai border around the period of the Cambodian-Vietnamese conflict. The monumental painting shows a mass of displaced people moving across the landscape, turning migration into something physically difficult to overlook. National Gallery Singapore describes it as one of Abad’s significant social realist works and notes that the Cambodian Refugees series developed from situations she witnessed directly.
Abad later became especially known for colourful stitched and stuffed trapunto paintings, but this earlier work shows another side of her practice. What stays with me is the scale. News photographs of refugees are often consumed quickly, one image among thousands. A painting several metres wide changes that relationship. You cannot absorb the crowd in a glance. Individual figures become part of a collective movement while still resisting disappearance into statistics. Scale becomes an ethical decision about how long an image asks us to look.
https://www.nationalgallery.sg/sg/en/learn-about-art/art-conservation.html
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