Tidawhitney Lek’s paintings seem to blur different times and places, reality and fantasy. Likewise, her color palettes mix vivid, sun-kissed tones and more steely, subdued hues. These contrasts are all part of the complex fusion of influences and narrative threads that have fed into the 32-year-old Cambodian-American artist’s practice, shaped in equal parts by often-unspoken family history and her own experiences growing up in poverty in Long Beach.

Lek was passionate about art from a young age, but didn’t think she would be able to follow it as a career path. But as she studied at Cal State Long Beach in the early 2010s, thinking that she would become a math teacher, a student trip to New York changed her mind. Visits to artist studios in the cultural hub allowed her to experience the world of contemporary art in a way she hadn’t in her hometown. Back in California, Lek dived into art, but predominantly worked in abstraction. Her current figurative style would slowly emerge after she graduated in 2017 and honed her skills working in the studios of other Los Angeles painters.

Today, her paintings combine multiple spaces and temporalities, surreally juxtaposing realistically depicted people and objects. Visibly American settings are sometimes accompanied by lush vegetation that recalls Southeast Asia, and the people in her paintings often don traditional Cambodian garments like the sampot and sarong. Lek builds these homely-yet-mysterious scenes, often located in domestic settings, out of intricate brushwork in oil, acrylic, watercolor, and more unexpected materials like glitter. One reoccurring motif in her practice is disembodied hands, which reach out from behind doors or out of frying pans. It’s left ambiguous whether the hands are nefarious or benign, but they do seem to be creating connections, whether transmitting care or painful family memories. As the painter explains, “The hands really respond in a very mischievous way. They creep out in the corners and they lurk. But at the same time they’re also doing motherly things.”

Relatives, from 2022, provides a snapshot of Lek’s recent work: Just off the center of the canvas a woman stands facing out from what appears to be the gate of a house, her head in one of her hands. Below some steps, another woman gazes up at her, apparently grinning. Grilles, fences, and the luscious sunset in the background seem to scream LA, but it’s harder to place the greenery that pops up around every corner as Californian or otherwise. Adding to the piece’s sense of the uncanny, the angles between different sections appear ever-so-slightly off, space feeling somehow flattened. And not least of all, two disembodied hands — this time green — emerge from underneath a potlid. It’s a scene that’s full of domestic familiarity, yet also imbued with melancholy and strangeness.

Shown in the Hammer Museum’s most recent biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living,” Refuge (2023) more explicitly references Lek’s parents’ experiences as refugees who fled Cambodia for the United States. Based on a wartime experience of her father — something that was generally not discussed in Lek’s household when she was a child — the painting layers a scene of bombing in Cambodia onto closet doors in an apartment.

In a way, the piece is emblematic of Lek’s art as a whole. Visually and conceptually it is rooted in both her ancestral homeland and her more immediate home of Long Beach, while its creation came out of conversations with her father about the past. By fostering fresh dialogue with her family and community, Lek’s work doesn’t only record her exploration of her identity as a Cambodian American, but also actively takes her further along a journey of self-discovery.

Banner image courtesy Tidawhitney Lek.

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