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...
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...
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...
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)...
Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...