This intimate 10-by-10-inch square panorama documents the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek outside Phnom Penh—the execution site where the Khmer Rouge murdered approximately 17,000 Cambodians during their 1975-1979 reign of terror. The small square format concentrates attention with an intensity befitting the site’s commemorative weight.

Created in 1999, the work represents Hayashi’s expansion of her documentation to sites of twentieth-century genocide beyond the Japanese American camps with which she began. The Killing Fields—there were hundreds across Cambodia—embodied industrial-scale murder: prisoners transported from Tuol Sleng prison, killed with farming tools to save ammunition, and buried in mass graves now memorialized.

The compact format contrasts dramatically with the expansive horizontal panoramas characterizing most of Hayashi’s work. The deliberate smallness creates intimacy with horror, the viewer drawn close rather than distanced by monumental scale. The site itself is now a memorial, Buddhist stupa containing skulls, mass graves marked by depressions in the earth, and signs identifying where specific atrocities occurred.

Cambodia’s genocide killed between 1.5 and 2 million people—roughly a quarter of the population—through execution, starvation, and forced labor. The Khmer Rouge attempted to create an agrarian utopia by eliminating intellectuals, professionals, and anyone connected to the previous government or foreign influence.

This panorama documents testimony to state violence on a scale that parallels the Japanese American incarceration Hayashi documented elsewhere while exceeding it in lethality. The small format forces intimate confrontation with evidence of genocide that larger compositions might aestheticize.