Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition. The title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior. Their identities are unknown. The ghostly, illuminated space creates a strange effect of time traveling, transporting viewers back to the historical event depicted. The men’s gazes seem to tell stories that have been buried in collective memory. For Lê, the act of appropriating, recycling, and remixing imagery is a means of rescuing both images and the memories embedded within them.
Dinh Q. Lê’s artistic practice centers on his lived experience of political and social conditions in his native Vietnam; he and his family fled the country via Thailand in 1979 and immigrated to the United States. Lê interweaves the experiences that helped shape his identity with Vietnamese national mythologies, collective memories, and expanded cultural histories. Incorporating imagery from a variety of sources, such as archival photographs, documentaries, Hollywood films, and Vietnamese iconography, Lê’s investigations raise critical questions about the distribution, reception, and consumption of images, and how images inform national identity.
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Negligee (2013) serves as an example of this tension, with its artful angle and play with shadow and light upon the sensual subject, rendering the image ambiguous...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...