Beach Khmer Temples

This piece was my final project for my digital illustration class that I took this past summer taught by Jesse Pak at CSUF. Pretty much a five week long painting + Adobe Illustrator bootcamp, and I certainly grew a lot as an artist.

The premise I had for this is based on Cambodian owned donut shops in SoCal. A family friend owns + My blood aunt works at an popular Cambodian-owned donut shop among the Asian community called Seaside Pastries. It’s right on Newport Beach so it’s a staple college outing to go late at night to pick up some green thai tea and croissants, then walk out to the pier to watch the ocean and chat. It’s really heartwarming to see a fundamental staple of the Khmer-American experience be popularized and created into a SoCal communal experience.

I took that same ethos of mixing Orange County beaches and Cambodian culture by mashing those two concepts quite literally. I came up with a backstory that there was a rupture in space and time, causing many ancient landmarks of the world to teleport to random other regions, creating an intersecting effect between the surrounding landscapes.