A detail most people notice about artist Tidawhitney Lek’s paintings are the hands — creeping around the edge of a canvas; springing up from the grass with fingertips together, prayer-like; emerging unexpectedly from the dank depths of a storm sewer.
Born and raised in Long Beach, Lek has found success in the art world with work representing a blend of her family and cultural background, her past and the present.
A show of her paintings can be seen at the Long Beach Museum of Art Downtown until Feb. 4. (Also, a mural Lek painted in 2019 can be seen at Gaviota Avenue and Anaheim Street.)
Her art teacher at Wilson High School, Dominic Szeto, said he recognized her technical talent and drive when she took his advanced painting and drawing classes around 2010 – and since then, Lek has “developed the conceptual and theoretical sides” of her work.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently added one of her pieces to its collection, which to Szeto means, “you’ve made it into the major leagues.”
Lek said she thinks maybe now her family understands what she’s doing with her life. Her parents, who were adolescents when they came to the U.S. from Cambodia in the late 1980s, wondered whether she could earn a living making art, she said.
“When I sold my first painting,” Lek said of her father, “he was like, ‘wow.’”
Her paintings have been getting bigger over the past year – one three-paneled piece in the LBMA show is 6 feet by 12 feet – but she’s done some as small as a sheet of paper and usually has 10 paintings in various stages of progress going at a time.
Lek said she’ll take tons of pictures of anything she might want to paint and look through them later for ideas. The three-paneled painting depicts the front of a convenience store, complete with sign-covered windows, and just inside the open door, a woman reaching across the counter to pay an unseen cashier – and it’s a real place, the Dong Mai Market at the corner of Anaheim and Orange avenues.
The hands that are a running theme for Lek grew out of a conversation with her mother.
“We were sitting next to each other and she was like, ‘You have wrinkly hands,’” Lek said. “I just laughed, because I understood what she meant – ‘you have hard-working hands.’”
At some point, she started adding glittery fingernails to most of the hands to signify that they’re feminine.
Hands can tell you about a person without having to see the rest of them, Lek said. They fit in with the themes in her work of neighborhood and community, family and generational trauma.
Having one of her paintings at LACMA means more people can see her work, and Lek is happy about that. “It’s for myself, but I didn’t know there was such a community that needed it too.”
In high school, she didn’t care about art contests – Szeto would enter her work and bring her the ribbon – but she’s glad he encouraged her to go to Cal State Long Beach, where she graduated with an art degree in 2017.
Szeto said he hadn’t spoken with Lek for a few years when he went to a show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and spotted two of her paintings immediately. They reconnected and she’s planning to visit Wilson High to speak to his students.
“As an art teacher, you don’t want to train people to be the next Van Gogh,” Szeto said. “You want to train them so that they love the arts – so to have one (student) make it to this level is quite unique.”
As a teenager, Lek — now 31 — knew she needed to consider “what I was going to do for probably the rest of my life, and I had to like it,” she said
Now she’s doing it, and she’s thinking about what’s next. The sixth of seven children in her family, Lek appreciates that she gets to take chances in life that her older siblings didn’t get to take, she said.
“I realize I’ve had my moment being propelled as an emerging artist, now it’s like being able to sustain it.”
The Long Beach Museum of Art Downtown, 356 E. 3rd St., Long Beach, is open Thursdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free.