This is the earliest surviving painting by You Khin. It was made soon after the artist’s arrival in France, on the night when he first met his future wife, You Muoy. The Eiffel Tower appears in the background. Khin and Muoy met at a dinner for Cambodian scholarship students held at the Eiffel Tower; they were studying in different parts of France at the time. You Khin (b. 1947, Cambodia; d. 2009, Cambodia) is believed to be the only Cambodian artist who was actively exhibiting before the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge period, who continued to professionally practice and exhibit during the ensuing decades. His work from the 1970s onwards has been consistently engaged with a cubist-like style of semi-abstraction, and with depicting urban scenes, often with an unsentimental focus on migrants and poverty as subject matter. Khin's biography is defined by his travels: living and working in Cambodia until 1973, then in France until 1977, then in Sudan until 1979, then in the Ivory Coast until 1981, then in Qatar until 1999, then in London until 2004, then in Cambodia until his death in 2009.
