“When I started painting my family in my home, it was literally tackling things I’d been wanting to talk to them about,” says Lek. “It’s not until we make the paintings that we find room to address it.”
A Long Beach-born painter captures the surrealism of the Cambodian American experience
The first thing you notice about the paintings of Tidawhitney Lek is the hands. Hands slink around doorways and sofas and emerge out of closets and gutters. They play with the locks on your door while you are napping and cleaver banana plants in the middle of the night. Sometimes the hands are green; other times, human shades of brown. Always, they bear glittery manicures. Never is it revealed to whom these hands might belong or whether their intention is protective or sinister.
“People always ask me, ‘Friend or foe?’” Lek says of the mysterious appendages. “I say, ‘That’s the idea.’”
The magic in Lek’s work extends well beyond hands. On the surface, her paintings appear to chronicle intimate domestic scenes. In one canvas, a woman dozes peacefully on a couch; in another, two women linger in a lush garden. But look closer and you’ll find details that unsettle. The sleeping figure rests on a sofa whose abstracted pattern evokes a swarm of winged insects. And the garden where the women idle isn’t a single space but a vertiginous composite of several spaces whose angles defy the laws of physics.
No work of Lek’s, however, disorients quite like “Refuge,” a three-panel painting completed in 2023 that extends to a width of 12 feet. Now on view in “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living,” the sixth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, it shows three girls, seen from behind, reacting to the bombardment of the Cambodian countryside in the 1970s. Give the canvas a fleeting glance and it might seem as if the girls are huddled behind a soldier in a rice paddy.
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But look again and you’ll find that this wartime scene — inspired by the experiences of Lek’s Cambodian father — is something else entirely. The explosion is actually rendered on the surface of a closet door in a mundane apartment where the girls sit next to a pink bucket and a sewing machine. Naturally, there is a hand: a gnarled, green claw that emerges from the depths of the closet, like a ghost of the past reaching into the present.
In Lek’s paintings, rich colors catch the eye: sunsets in shades of Los Angeles toxic and lots of sparkling sampot — the traditional Cambodian wrap worn around the lower body. But horrors real and cinematic simmer just beneath the surface. Diana Nawi, an independent curator who served as co-curator for “Acts of Living,” says Lek’s work contains humor, “but it is also tied to this very real violence.”
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On a warm Monday morning in October, Lek greets me and Times photographer Genaro Molina with strawberries and freshly brewed tea in her sunny studio, located above a scrum of stalls selling succulents and bamboo in the Flower District. Hanging on walls and propped up against columns are a series of new paintings that will appear in “Living Spaces,” a solo show that opens Friday at the Long Beach Museum of Art’s satellite exhibition space in the city’s downtown. In one canvas, a hand with sparkling pink nails grips a door frame in a setting that confuses indoors and out; in another, a group of men in Western dress play a Cambodian dice game called klah klok.
For Lek, this is a moment of institutional prominence. Her paintings open the Hammer biennial just as she is about to have her first museum solo. But her success follows a period of searching — searching for the right visual language to articulate her experience as the U.S.-born daughter of Cambodian refugees who survived the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime in the 1970s.
“These paintings are my diaries,” says Lek. “I’m literally in conversation with myself. What was yesterday? What is today? And what is going on tomorrow?”
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Lek, 30, was born and raised in Long Beach to parents who emigrated from Battambang, in northwestern Cambodia. “I’m the first generation of an immigrant family that grew up really poor on Section 8,” she says. “My mom has six kids. I’m number six.”
In Cambodia, her paternal grandfather had been a tailor. On her mother’s side, her grandfather had worked as some sort of merchant. “My mom doesn’t say too much about her past,” Lek says. “But she has said her father was a businessman. He sold and traded.”
Lek’s parent’s were adolescents when the totalitarian Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, emptying out cities and systematically killing the country’s professional and intellectual classes. Nearly a quarter of the population (about 1.7 million people) died during its rule from violence, overwork and starvation. Her parents survived, but many extended family members did not.
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After the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, the couple made their way to refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. By 1984, they had relocated to the United States, living for a short time in Boston before settling in Long Beach, home to a large Cambodian diaspora clustered on the eastern side of the city in a neighborhood known as Cambodia Town.
Cambodia’s history stretches back centuries and includes magnificent traditions in temple architecture and bronze sculpture. But the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign of terror casts a long — and often silent — shadow. “For school, we’d have these assignments where it’s like, ‘Go ask your parents what it was like when they were growing up,’” recalls Lek. “And they’d be like, ‘Why do you need to do this?’”
Art was important to Lek from an early age. “Since I was a kid, I was the art girl,” she says. “But my parents always told me that this was something that was not going to pay the bills.”
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