An illustration of the typical conditions found in Tuol Sleng Prison, a former high school ...

An illustration of the typical conditions found in Tuol Sleng Prison, a former high school transformed into a Khmer Rouge facility used for torturing and killing between 14,000 and 17,000 'enemies' of the revolution which included former government members, intellectuals, religious groups and in the final years of Khmer Rouge control, fellow Khmer Rouge party members, including the Prison's former torturers. The painting is part of a series of 15 undertaken by Vann Nath, one of only seven survivors of Tuol Sleng, and depicts a prisoner having his fingernails pulled out with a pair of pliers by his torturers. The French caption reads 'Toruture by means of fingernail extraction'. Arrested in his home province of Battambang in December 1977, and accused of working for the CIA, Vann Nath suffered six months of beatings, torture and starvation at Tuol Sleng and only survived when his captors discovered he was a painter and put him to work painting portraits of Pol Pot. Accompanied by the screams of other prisoners being tortured, Vann completed eight or nine large portraits over six months before he was reassigned to assist the prison's stone sculptor, Ten Chan, carve likenesses of Pol Pot. Having spared his life, his captors continued to torture him, but less often, and he was still working in the prison on 11 January 1979 when the Vietnamese invasion reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh, scattering the prison guards and making him a free man. After this, Vann Nath ran a restaurant in Phnom Penh with his wife, who also survived. Their two children died of disease and starvation.