Crocodile Tears, Oakland Twenty Three (2016)
Abstraction Series, drawings by Lananh Lê 
This project is a series of abstract drawings I've done throughout an elongated and challenging period of growth inspired by healing from past triggers, including sexual & intergenerational traumas, cultural shocks, the traumas of racism & patriarchal violence, etc. The project started out with a meeting at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) with artist Xxavier Edward Carter, who was working on his performance "Exercising A Popular Fiction: Black Spring to Black Summer" for the ICI exhibition entitled, "The Ocean after Nature." At the time, I was working with Jeff Chang, Roberta Uno, and the IDA cohort on our research project on Future Aesthetics (Ford Foundation, ArtchangeUS). During this period of living in a gentrifying Bay Area, I started socializing with a well-connected circle of Southeast Asian artists and scholars, including Việt Lê, Adele Ina Ray, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Julie Thi Underhill, etc. Influenced by these visionaries, I started to make works which engaged with my Southeast Asian heritage. 
"Crocodile Tears, Oakland Twenty Three" was inspired by a heartbreak with a fellow Việtnamese artist whose name I will not divulge. This artist has lived with me through by-products of trying to force ourselves into a heteronormative monogamous relationship in the midst of modern change and our own forces of freedom. At this, spiritual meditations have been guiding my visual journey through heartbreak, marking an arrival at abstract expressions of pain, conflict and love... 
The project is heavily informed by the precedent works of Ai Weiwei, Trinh T. Minh Ha, Jeff Chang and Việt Lê.
The series chronologically charts the psychological landscapes through which I have been traversing in time, to make an arrival at my artistic practice from a place of living in modern neoliberal America as a queer female-identified Vietnamese immigrant... Although I have intended this project to be a space and time to experiment only with black inked lineworks, the series includes many pieces in multi-hued watercolor and acrylics. 
Some of the drawings are accompanied by poetic recordings of my musing and meditations. The abstract gesture is a form of meditation itself, heavily inspired by both Xxavier's aesthetic and Eastern calligraphy.