Frontal, in the Extreme

When you stand before any one of Tidawhitney Lek’s canvases, the difference between what a painting is and what a painting is about comes to the forefront of one’s mind. In her paintings, the SoCal painter depicts the people and places she knew growing up in Long Beach, where her parents emigrated from Cambodia. Lek’s parents built their lives from the ground up after arriving in California; they learned English, found jobs, and started a family. But despite making a new life for their family, far away from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, they were not free from their memories of the Cambodian genocide. From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot, the revolutionary leader and dictator, killed nearly 25% of the nation’s population. Lek’s family history takes shape in her paintings, in which viewers can see first- and second-generation Cambodian-Americans going about their daily routines: walking to school, visiting the corner store, comforting an infant, or lighting a cigarette,