TIDAWHITNEY LEK
Something Familiar
November 21, 2026 - January 30, 2027
Night Gallery is proud to present Something Familiar, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Tidawhitney Lek. This is Lek’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, following her inclusion in What Will You Give?, a two-person exhibition at Sidecar Gallery, and our recent group exhibition Rare Earth.
Lek’s bright, densely populated canvases draw from the textures of her own life—her Cambodian-American family and cultural traditions, her household, and the streets and shopfronts of Long Beach and Anaheim. Across the exhibition, the quotidian becomes a vessel for history, connection, and the cultural forces that shape everyday life.
While making these paintings, Lek came to recognize the body of work as an unintentional self-portrait. In many of the pieces, she uses her own body as a stand-in figure—turned away, partially obscured, or otherwise withheld—allowing a physical presence to anchor a scene without fixing it to a single identity. Her subjects often emerge from aspects of daily life so familiar that they hardly register as material until she considers how they might appear to someone outside her household. In Wat, Lek depicts a ritual at the Buddhist temple her family attends, in which each person touches the person before them, forming an energetic chain that reaches toward the altar. The gesture becomes an image of inherited devotion, intimacy, and obligation.
Inheritance carries particular weight in Lek’s family. Her parents survived the Cambodian genocide as children, spending four years in a labor camp before eventually resettling in the United States. Though this history is rarely discussed directly within her family, it surfaces throughout Lek’s work as an undertow beneath otherwise familiar scenes. In Beg or Pray, a pair of clasped hands streaked with blood holds the title’s two meanings at once: supplication as both prayer and desperation, reflecting the complicated entanglement of trauma and faith.
Elsewhere, Lek expands outward from the domestic into the civic. Auto Corner, her largest painting to date, reconstructs the corner of the Anaheim auto shop where her fiancé works. Palm tree silhouettes, characteristic of Lek’s paintings, rise along the horizon. Sunflowers grow beneath the shop’s sign, while the business’s chain-link fence appears compressed in the reflection of a parked SUV’s window, layering public and private space within a single image. Another painting responds to a 2025 ICE raid in the Los Angeles Flower District, where Lek once maintained a studio. Returning shortly afterward, she encountered women holding one another and crying in the aftermath, even as the shops remained open and the women remained at work. For Lek, painting becomes a means of recording such moments and preserving histories that might otherwise disappear from view.
Doorways, fences, windows, and thresholds recur throughout the exhibition, opening one space onto another while marking boundaries that can be crossed, closed, or held in place. In another work, Lek depicts herself and her sister sharing a joint amid the ruins of a Cambodian temple she photographed, bringing personal, familial, and ancestral histories into the same frame.
Taken together, the paintings move fluidly between the intimate and the historical. Lek approaches the household, the street, and family ritual not as spaces removed from history, but as places where history continues to accumulate and take form. What first appears mundane gradually reveals itself as something denser: a record of memory, inheritance, and faith—the persistence of the past within everyday life.