By arts editor Helen Musa

Multiskilled documentary filmmaker and 2018 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year, Kim Beamish, has been turning his hand to painting.

Acknowledged for his films Just Punishment, The Tentmakers of Cairo and Oyster, Beamish spent years living in Hanoi working on a film called What Remains, about a former Vietnamese soldier searching for the missing bodies of National Liberation Front fighters.

He also took time out in 2024 to make his directorial debut at The Mill Theatre in the courtroom drama Terror, by German lawyer and writer Ferdinand von Schirach.

Now Beamish has emailed us from Phnom Penh, where he lives, to say he is about to open his first solo exhibition in Cambodia, a series of pictures initially inspired by a piece of political graffiti hidden in a laneway near his home.

Described by a Cambodian artist friend, when he first saw the work, as “quick, rough and direct”, the exhibition comments on a world that Beamish often feels is upside down and very much not perfect, hence the title, NoT PerfEct [sic].

“When we spoke I mentioned that I was looking to put an exhibition of my painting and pictures together,” Beamish has written, “Well that time has come and while it is not in Canberra, not even close, I thought I’d reach out and let you know about it.”

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