Working in photography, film, and installation, Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968) challenges Western narratives of war and migration to present the nuanced perspective of Vietnam and the global Vietnamese diaspora.  Lê’s singular voice has reframed global   histories   of   Southern   Vietnam, challenging   censorship, exploitation, and propaganda from all sides. Weaving photographs together   using   a   traditional   technique   he learned from his aunt, Cambodia Reamker #33, 2022, hybridizes ancient and modern iconographies of Cambodian culture into a multivalent new narrative. For this work, Lê photographed a fresco of the national epic poem of Cambodia, Reamker, currently housed in the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh.  A foundational myth of Khmer history, Reamker explores the struggle to balance good and evil, justice and fidelity. Lê interweaves his photo with bitterly iconic black and white portraits taken by the Khmer Rouge to document prisoners who they brutally killed throughout the late-1970s. Lê’s commitment to restoring dignity and cultural specificity to survivors of violent conflict is rooted in lived experience. Lê holds a BFA from UC Santa Barbara.  He has participated in the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the 2009 Biennale Cuveê, Linz, Austria; the 2008 Singapore Biennale, Singapore; and the 2006 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia. His work has been exhibited at major institutions and international exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Asia Society, New York, NY, among many others. Lê was recently the subject of the exhibition, The thread of memory and other photographs at musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, and his work is currently on view in Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia at the National Gallery Singapore, Singapore.  

For Gerald Lovell (b. 1992), painting is an act of biography. Combining flat and impressionistic painting with thick daubs of impasto, Lovell’s monumental portraits depict loving scenes often lost to the abyss of memory. Lovell’s portraits refuse the notion that all Black figures put down on canvas are somehow political. Rather, works like Matt, Sean (a day at Herbert Von King park), 2022, record a deep commitment to fostering alternative community narratives by imbuing their subjects with social agency and self-determinative power, while also revealing individualistic details that lay their essential humanity bare. Born in Chicago to Puerto Rican and Black parents, Lovell began painting at the age of 22 after dropping out of the graphic design program at the University of West Georgia. He has exhibited at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Jeffrey Deitch, Moore Building, Miami, FL; Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC; and MINT, Atlanta, GA, among others. Lovell’s work was recently on view in What is left unspoken, Love at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Gerald will present his next solo exhibition with the gallery in January 2024.

Martin Wong (1946-1999) was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. In The Most Beautiful Painting in the World, 1989, Wong depicts the famed cartoon characters, Mutt and Jeff, playing cards in his iconic, highly detailed brick motif. In the background, a popular World War II graffiti symbol, Kilroy Was Here, appears in repeated form. In his essay “Bricks and Jails: On Martin Wong’s Queer Fantasies,” David Getsy argues, “the brick can also be seen as demonstrating the potential of relations and connections that are not determined by difference; they are, by contrast, made possible by sameness. Any two bricks can form a bond, and it is a queer stance to value relations not determined by preconceived binary differences.” Wong’s work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Bronx Museum of The Arts, Bronx, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; and Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts, Bronx, NY, in November 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA. Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, the first extensive, touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, is now on view at the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, Spain, and will travel to KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Camden Art Centre, London, UK; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Wong’s work is also currently on view in the exhibition Somewhere Downtown: Art in 1980s New York, UCCA, Beijing, China, curated by Carlo McCormick and UCCA Curator-at-Large Peter Eleey.