Bou Meng, a Cambodian painter who was one of only a handful of prisoners to survive the Khmer Rouge interrogation and torture house Tuol Sleng, and who later became a fixture at the genocide museum on the site, died on Friday. He was 85.
The death was announced by the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. No further details were provided.
Late in his life, Mr. Bou Meng was one of four living symbols of the Khmer Rouge atrocities that left 1.7 million people dead between 1975 and 1979.
Together with another Tuol Sleng survivor who returned to the prison, a mechanic named Chum Mey, he personified the victims. A few miles down the road, the last two surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime were tried. They were convicted of crimes against humanity in 2014 and of genocide in 2018; Nuon Chea died in 2019, and Khieu Samphan remains in prison.
Some 14,000 people were arrested and interrogated at Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, and almost all were sent to a killing field. As Huy Vannak describes in his 2010 biography, “Bou Meng: A Survivor From Khmer Rouge Prison S-21,” Mr. Bou Meng was spared, after two months of imprisonment and seven days of torture, when a guard called out to a group of shackled prisoners, “Can anyone paint pictures?”
Mr. Bou Meng was assigned to paint portraits of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, as well as of Marx and Lenin, fearing for his life if he made a mistake. Another painter who survived Tuol Sleng, Vann Nath, died in 2011.
Mr. Bou Meng, a short, forceful man who built a two-story home on his earnings from selling his biography to tourists — money he sometimes stashed under the brim of his hat — remained tormented by the ghosts of his fellow prisoners, who he said came to him in dreams demanding that he find justice for them.
In 2009, he testified at the trial of the commandant of the prison, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who received a life sentence from a tribunal supported by the United Nations and died in 2020.
On the witness stand, Mr. Bou Meng asked Duch if he knew what had become of his wife, who was arrested with him in 1977. After Duch said she had probably been sent to a killing field, Mr. Bou Meng went home and painted a terrifying image of a woman kneeling at the edge of a pit as a man holds a knife to her throat. He hung the picture in front of the small counter at the Tuol Sleng museum where he sold his biography.
Mr. Bou Meng was born on April 4, 1941, to a peasant family in Kampong Cham province. At the age of 5 he was sent to live in a Buddhist pagoda. He taught himself to paint and later found work making posters for movie theaters.
In 1965, he married Ma Yoeun. They joined the Khmer Rouge revolution — spurred, like many other recruits, by the destructive American bombing of the Cambodian countryside and inspired by propaganda calling on them to support their king, Norodom Sihanouk, who had been ousted in a coup.
Mr. Bou Meng was assigned to paint propaganda posters for the Khmer Rouge; his wife was taught the rudiments of health care and became a nurse in the countryside.
When the fighting ended in 1975 and the Khmer Rouge forced millions of residents to evacuate Phnom Penh, Mr. Bou Meng and his wife were sent in the opposite direction — from the countryside into the city, where he worked as a painter and typist in a Khmer Rouge government office and she was put to work in a hospital.
The last time he was with her was on the day of their arrest, listening through his blindfold as she pleaded for her life. In 2009, Mr. Bou Meng told The New York Times that, like many who were taken, he had no idea why he had been arrested.
“Every night I looked out at the moon,” he recalled of his months as a prisoner. “I heard people crying and sighing around the building. I heard people calling out, ‘Mother help me, mother help me!’”
Under torture, he finally gave in and falsely said that he had been an agent of the C.I.A. Like other prisoners, he gave the names of people he said were part of a fictitious spy network — names that sometimes set off new chains of arrests.
After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, he returned to Tuol Sleng to work in an office after the prison was converted into a museum. He said that among the whips and shackles, he found a half-finished portrait of Pol Pot that he had abandoned.
He went on to support himself painting murals of holy scenes in Buddhist temples and meditation centers. When rumors spread in the early 2000s that he had died, he returned once more to the prison museum, and eventually began selling his biography there.
He remarried and had a daughter. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
But he continued to carry a tiny portrait of his first wife in his wallet. “I know I should forget her,” he said in 2009, “but I can’t.”
