Two stone sculptures of Pol Pot lying amongst chains and restraining irons at Tuol Sleng Prison, ...

Two stone sculptures of Pol Pot lying amongst chains and restraining irons at 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. They were sculpted by Ten Chan, a master craftsman whose talents were already known for his restorative work on the Angkor Wat temple complex during the late 1960s and early 1970s. When the Khmer Rouge took power, he was forced to make replacement parts for rice threshers and sawmills before he escaped, was captured and sent to Tuol Sleng. Here he was tortured (at one point for 26 days straight), his hands put in a closed box full of scorpions after his fingernails had been pulled out, starved and finally forced to make a false confession. Following this treatment, he was given a block of wood and told to make a likeness of Pol Pot. Ten Chan says, "I tried to do a perfect job to save my life." He then worked in stone, turning out three larger than life busts which were destined for prominent display in Phnom Penh when the invading Vietnamese entered the capital on 11 January 1979, scattering the prison guards and making him a free man. In his later sculpting efforts, he was assisted by Vann Nath, a painter who also survived Tuol Sleng.