Bun Heang Ung - ace cartoonist

Bun Heang Ung is a remarkably talented artist and animator. The sixty drawings that accompanied his book, The Murderous Revolution - his real-life struggle to survive the Khmer Rouge regime - are a vivid testimony of those tragic times. Bun collaborated with Martin Stuart-Fox to produce the book, which was first published in 1985. In fact, his book was published on three occasions. Bun recalls, "The old editions were poor in quality. The first was published in Sydney, second and third in Bangkok...and of course in Cambodia it was by pirate publishing. I was disappointed to see the book with poor quality, I had put so much detail into every drawing - I would like my drawing to tell the story itself. You see when I arrived in Australia 26 years ago, I had started to draw those toons from my memories almost every night for 2 years, 90 drawings, 14 hours each..." Bun would love to re-publish his graphic recollections in a book titled, Khmer Rouge and Its Evil Revolution; "I'm looking for a good publisher to put my drawings in a new form with big size printing. Fingers crossed, I'll find one."

Bun's animation work has appeared in films and tv programmes in the past and he's returning to it again, after much of the business had been snapped up by Chinese and Indian animators in recent times. He's also universally known for his searingly satirical caricatures and cartoons, having been a political cartoonist for the Far Eastern Economic Review for a number of years. However, it has a downside, as he's not been back to his beloved Cambodia in recent years for safety reasons, as he sees it, "I'm a very ugly black sheep in Cambodia. However, I draw my toons every day from my heart: Cambodia, My Home, My Soul, My Heart."

His own website, Sacrava Toons, displays a wealth of his work at sacrava.blogspot.com. Click on the archived month - March 2005 - to see a number of his impressive drawings from The Murderous Revolution.

Below is one of Bun's indelible images, recalling the arrival of the Khmer Rouge troops in Phnom Penh in April 1975 and the subsequent evacuation of the city at gunpoint (reproduced with kind permission).