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...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
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...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
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...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...