Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, Long Beach, CA) is a Cambodian-American painter. Her work plays with narrative and the everyday experience of a first-generation American born to immigrant parents. Her bright and somber paintings present nuances of domesticity. Figures and hands interact in her compositions as cultural Southeast-Asian elements echo through mundane objects. Lek reinvents the conventional mediums of pastel, acrylic, and oil paints on canvas, interchanging textures as pictorial spaces recede and soften. Lek’s work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY & Los Angeles, CA; the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL; The Armory Show, New York, NY; and Made in LA 2023 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among other galleries and institutions. Her work has been acquired by Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; East West Bank Collection, Pasadena, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Your paintings dissolve the line between interiors and exteriors, memory and reality. What draws you to this fluid, dream-like way of storytelling?
Throughout the process, I ponder on my awareness between past and present times from personal and inherited histories. By utilizing depth, space, and composition on canvas as a way of playing with the picture plane, I can distort and create uncanny notions. It’s the engaging feeling that everything is happening all at once, simultaneously in a seamless manner. It’s a way of keeping the viewer moving in transition between one thought to another that accumulates into a narrative. By stringing together an image, a thought, an idea, a phrase, a word, piece by piece to another until it is one and whole.
Your work captures both the warmth and complexity of domestic life. Do you see home as a place of comfort, tension, or a shifting combination of both?
Definitely a shifting combination of both. When I was a child, I absorbed from my surroundings and whatever I was exposed to, but as I got older feelings lingered unexplained in the home. They were never really discussed nor did I take the time to acknowledge and dissect them. It was negated between me and my family either because I was too young to understand or it was hard to find the words. The definition of home was given to me by others, but eventually, I outgrew that. I made room to redefine it for myself and on my own terms. I’ve been spending the time reflecting and comparing home from what I once thought it was or had been to now helping me understand what it is and can be for me now.
Hands often appear in your compositions, interacting and gesturing. What role do they play in conveying the emotional and cultural depth of your work?
The hands were a way of talking about generational trauma and inherited history. The events beyond a specific individual, less about a particular face, to instead evoke a more thoughtful look at our engagement with humanity. I began painting the hands when I had a moment with my mother. There was a day I came by to visit. I was sitting next to her and she was looking at my hands. She said to me, “They look wrinkly,” in other words, not beautiful, but hard working. I just thought to myself why does she have to say it like that, but I already knew. She can’t help it, she was molded that way.
Your paintings intertwine cultural histories with personal memory. How do you approach layering these narratives, and what impact does this have on how you see the present?
I’m doing my best to document my own history and buttress it against the history of my parent’s along with humanity’s. I came to an epiphany when I began painting imagery that I noticed what little effort I made to embrace my roots. I was 25 years old at the time. I felt so irresponsible towards it and was missing a whole lot of what my identity was truly about. From then on I made it a part of my purpose to not forget my parent’s generation, to let it guide me best on how to shape the present conversations I was having so that others may learn too. By continuing and extending the dialogue, shifting the narrative back and forth between generational experiences, I can help contribute a space of healing or understanding for others to join in bettering themselves and the future.
Your paintings invite the viewer in with lush color and rich detail, yet they often suggest something more ominous beneath the surface. How do you balance this duality?
I’m thinking about how to make the hard-spoken truth digestible, and how best to work directly with genuine honesty yet indirectly head-on to such sensitive topics. It’s like leaving bread crumbs. I’m selectively choosing what imagery, color, and clarity should sit next to each other to create a push and pull moment, to keep the viewer sticking around long enough to analyze the whole narrative. There are usually two conversations working between each other, how should I paint this and what should I paint? Back and forth the conversation goes, analyzing the last moves on the canvas and thinking about the possibilities of the next. Each next move is more calculated than the last working with what little empty space I have left untouched or unconsidered until there is no more room left to fill.
Your compositions contain overlapping moments in time and space. How do you decide what elements belong together, and what effect do you hope this has on the viewer’s experience?
The overlap of time and space is dealt with through relationships of relativity with the viewer. What is it that we all share and don’t? How can I meet the viewer halfway from a place we started off so differently from? What is it that we all understand but recognize differently? I’m composing points-of-views, a space for examination where many facets of the truth can intersect. It’s the nuances in details where the elements dissect and diverge that makes it more personal and distinct to my own story. I tend to use the idea of the noun, a person, a place, or things as elements to find the middle ground for the viewer and the theme/concept to be a timeless conversation. Overall, the hope for the viewer is to have a humble reminder of how much they do and don’t know, how small and big they are to the world, others, and me.
Your paintings incorporate cultural items and unique spaces. Is the clothing, household items, decorations, and spaces they inhabit in your paintings real or imagined?
Nearly everything in the painting is real from my life. I wanted to truly document these objects and places that have been ingrained in my story and identity. Some of which remain today while others have been lost and/or forgotten reminded only by the memory or second-hand photos and stories given to me. When I don’t want to utilize a person but still want to expand on the thought, I think of places or things that would still lead me in the same direction. A different door, another point of view, an opportunity elsewhere, yet still under the same umbrella.