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14 November 2025 - 17 January 2026 london
The Stories We Tell: Tidawhitney Lek, Emil Sands, Khalif Tahir Thompson
Introduction
Victoria Miro is delighted to present the first significant introduction of three emerging artists, all born in the 1990s, to a London audience.
The Stories We Tell offers a vivid exploration of memory, identity and family through the distinctive lenses of Tidawhitney Lek, Emil Sands, and Khalif Tahir Thompson. Each artist blends autobiographical elements with imagined and historical narratives, uniting their individual stories through a focus on the human figure. Tidawhitney Lek, a Cambodian-American artist based in Southern California, draws inspiration from her experience growing up as a first-generation American born to immigrant parents. Lek’s paintings are acts of remembering, documenting scenes of everyday life within a large Asian family. She paints with a sharp eye for detail, conjuring images that explore issues of home and belonging. Emil Sands, a London-born painter and writer currently living in New York, captures the physical idiosyncrasies of the human body in his large-scale canvases. His semi-nude figures, often viewed from behind, roam in expansive landscapes and open beach settings. In his tender portrayal of flesh, Sands explores the complex relationship between viewer and subject – between seeing and being seen. Khalif Tahir Thompson, born and based in Brooklyn, invites viewers into the everyday lives of his sitters through large, vibrant canvases. Describing his work as portraiture, many of Thompson’s paintings are inspired by family photograph albums. Thompson constructs compositions using this familial cast of characters, layering contemporary and cultural references that encourage us to consider notions of race, home, belonging and – crucially – how identity is shared.
The exhibition is accompanied by three new texts by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Christopher Riopelle, and Debbie Meniru:
‘In memorializing the mundane, Lek offers visual gestures of recognition to her family and community elders. This is not your motherland, but it is mine. And I will translate this place for you; I will make it ours.’ – Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, the Halperin Associate Curator of American Art and Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA
‘Time is rendered inconsequential here, sequence inadequate, in favour of a far richer engagement with a specific persona. As Sands, like Seurat, knows, our relationships especially with those closest to us evolve, mutate, flow.’ – Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London
‘Although rooted in the past, his paintings constantly pull us back to the present moment. It is this push and pull that creates the nostalgia which permeates much of Thompson’s work.’ – Debbie Meniru, an independent writer, editor and curator and previously the Assistant Curator of Research & Interpretation at Tate, London
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14Artists
03Editorials
03Tidawhitney Lek’s Elsewheres
Author
ALEESA PITCHAMARN ALEXANDER
Published
05 November 2025
Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander navigates the intricacies of time and place in paintings by Tidawhitney Lek
In Tidawhitney Lek’s paintings, figures are often depicted in transitional spaces: standing in doorways, walking through hallways, or climbing and descending stairs. When they are not resting or tending to each other, they are in motion. Her women frequently wear traditional Cambodian sarongs or sompots – skirts made of shimmering, geometrically patterned fabric cinched at the waist – usually paired with lacy blouses. Lek’s compositions evoke the feeling that these moments happen in our peripheral vision. Look away for a moment, and the scene might change. The people will have moved on. The viewer is left examining bags of rice or open doors leading elsewhere. Meanwhile, bougainvillea blooms on a metal fence as the sun sets in the distance. If you look closely enough, sometimes you’ll find an outstretched, ghostly hand.
Between 1975 and 1995, more than 150,000 Cambodians entered the United States, the majority of them as refugees fleeing the impact of the genocidal and destructive Khmer Rouge regime. Lek’s parents, who were teenagers when the movement seized power, were among those who survived and later resettled in the greater Long Beach, California area, which is home to one of the largest Cambodian communities in the United States. Born in Long Beach, Lek is the youngest daughter and sixth out of seven siblings. She grew up in this unique diasporic environment, one where you might hear the distinctive pok-pok sound of a neighbour pounding chili paste in a mortar and pestle or, on the weekends, join family in giving alms to monks from the local temple.
It is within this greater context – one shaped by forced migration, community care and translated traditions – that Lek creates her paintings. Lek’s smaller-scale works capture moments of unexpected beauty in her native landscape, as seen in Around the Corner, which features a trash can adorned with stickers and spray paint. Garbage bins, wrought iron fences, street signs and other markers of suburban and urban sprawl make frequent appearances in her work. These paintings express an evident affection for place. In memorialising the mundane, Lek offers visual gestures of recognition to her family and community elders: This is not your motherland, but it is mine. I will translate this place for you; I will make it ours.
To understand the present, Lek draws on her family’s past, creating compositions inspired by, or sometimes directly referencing, her family’s oral histories and experiences. These allusions are not always obvious, and even something as simple as a silhouetted palm tree in the background reminds us that the landscape of Southern California is not entirely different from that of Southeast Asia. (Many common plants in the United States are non-native, including almost all varieties of palm trees. Movement is, after all, a part of human and non-human life). As much as Lek is interested in her motherland, her paintings are less about Cambodia or the United States as nations than the boundary where someone’s memory of a place coincides with another’s lived experience. These meetings often occur in interior spaces like living rooms and bedrooms, such as in Can I Hold You?, where Lek’s mother and her two daughters lounge together on a bed. In the background, a recent news clip indicative of our present political climate – where the definition of American citizenship is once again contested – plays on an old-fashioned television. Threats to the safety of non-white people in the United States are nothing new. They infiltrate the sanctity of domestic space, but life goes on anyway. While this painting offers us a picture of supposed relaxation, it is also an image of strength in the face of ideological terror.
Although Lek’s tender gatherings evoke a sense of intimacy, they don’t promise a utopian escape. In these spaces, tough conversations might happen, or they might not. It’s unclear whether families can truly heal from intergenerational trauma or share their feelings without fear of judgment. However, as the artist notes, ‘It’s not until we make the paintings that we find room to address it.’ The ‘it’ – that may be addressed – might refer to all of the above and more. What matters is that in these images, Lek offers the space to explore the possibilities between us and the people we love. When words fail or can’t be said, perhaps painting can help bridge a divide.
Lek speaks broken Khmer (as someone who also speaks a broken mother tongue, I don’t mean this in a pejorative way). But instead of using fragmented sentences, the artist breaks her paintings into intimate vignettes that suggest, describe and connect rather than explain. This is a common aesthetic strategy in Lek’s work, particularly those rendered at a large scale. For example, the monumental painting, What Are You Looking At?, is organised into a segmented horizontal composition. Such fragmentation allows her to merge time and place into a single picture plane, where women walking among ancient Khmer ruins can coexist with those we assume to be elsewhere. But where is this elsewhere?
Looking beyond the figures, I notice the grass broom leaning against the kitchen counter and I am reminded of my grandmother sweeping the concrete outside our Bangkok home with a similar brush. On the counter sits a can of Café du Monde chicory coffee from New Orleans – a place that was once a French colony, like Cambodia. You can easily find both things at almost any Southeast Asian grocery store in California. Diasporic life insists that we are tethered to other lands through people and objects, while global trade makes the boundary between here and there ambiguous, like the spaces in Lek’s paintings. The artist’s ability to balance this environmental and psychological ambiguity with diaristic specificity is part of what makes her work so compelling. We know what the things in Lek’s paintings are, but we can never be sure where we are, just as we won’t know if these women across time and space will ever meet. Even if they never do, we still sense that they are somehow connected. Maybe this is what Asian America is – a tether, a fragmented place or an elsewhere.
Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander is The Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA. Text © Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander
‘It was endless bathing’: Cezanne, Emil Sands and a Shared Theme
Author
CHRISTOPHER RIOPELLE
Published
05 November 2025
In the enduring motif of the bather, Christopher Riopelle discovers creative connections between Paul Cezanne and Emil Sands
In 1899, the struggling artist Henri Matisse, not yet thirty, purchased a small, awkward oil painting by Paul Cezanne, Three Bathers (1879–82). He put himself and his young family into financial hardship by doing so but confessed that he could not not buy it. His art depended on it. Thirty-seven years later, and by then rich and famous, Matisse gifted the picture to the Petit Palais in Paris, commenting, ‘I have drawn from it my faith and perseverance.’(1) The remark is interpreted, often and surely correctly, as recognition that in his time Cezanne had been the most audacious painter of them all, from whom the questing vision of Matisse and so many others had sprung.
It acknowledges as well that, thanks not least to Cezanne, bather imagery has played a surprisingly large role in the evolution of modern art. Over and again, this uniquely malleable theme, rich in associations at once historical, formal, psychological and physical challenges artists. The body is omnipresent, but so too is nature in harmony or tension with it. The theme ties Antiquity to the Renaissance and Baroque, to Impressionism and what followed – think Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the 1860s, Georges Seurat in the 1880s – to Cubism, and to modern and contemporary bodily concerns. Think Marcel Duchamp. Matisse himself rose to the challenge; see his angular Bathers by a River (1909–17) in the Art Institute of Chicago. Pablo Picasso also boasted a Cezanne ‘bathers’ in his collection. In 1964, National Gallery Artist-Trustee Henry Moore insisted in the face of strident public objection that the gallery acquire Cezanne’s Bathers (1894–1905); he too came to own a ‘bathers’ by the artist and went on to make sculptures based enigmatically on both works. Jasper Johns – yes, he too owns a small male ‘bather’ by Cezanne, owned before him by Edgar Degas– repeatedly returns to the motif.
Young artists should make no small plans. Emil Sands has taken on the daunting subject with new energy. In his own words, bather imagery allows him to explore issues of ‘vulnerability and exposure’(2). His paintings relate to his biography including bodily health (in his case, cerebral palsy), and an intense body consciousness stemming from it. And he is by no means alone in his uncertainty about physicality and physical beauty, or other highly personal issues that come to the fore unsolicited when, on a summer’s day, we find ourselves more-or-less naked, more-or-less in public.
First, it must be recognised that Sands knows, and knows how to use, the self-referential strategies of classic modernism. Seurat’s monumental Models of 1886–88 (in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), shows three female nudes posing in the artist’s Paris studio. No, wait, it is something quite impossible – the same model shown three times in different poses, all in the same tight space. Similarly, Sands’s Aldo’s Dream, one of four canvasses in the current exhibition, shows the figure of his sibling not once but three times in close proximity, looking at us, moving away into silvery-blue water, turning back to catch our eye once more. Time is rendered inconsequential here, sequence inadequate, in favour of a far richer engagement with a specific persona. As Sands knows, like Seurat before him, our relationships, especially with those closest to us, evolve, mutate, flow.
Cezanne would have looked at Sands’s paintings and implicitly understood the issues the artist is dealing with. They were his own. Perhaps more than any other theme, male bathers evoked for Cezanne the deepest emotions and heart-felt memories. Take, for example, his still-startling Bathers at Rest of 1876–77 (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia). Four lads in various stages of undress stand or lie by a stream, physically together but psychologically apart. Back in the 1850s Cezanne and his male friends, including his closest friend, the writer-to-be, Émile Zola, bathed repeatedly in the countryside near Aix-en-Provence. Zola remembered of his youth there: ‘We remained naked on the sand for hours… It was endless bathing.’ Cezanne briefly returned from Paris to Aix in 1876 which may well have jogged his memory as he set to work on this key painting of his mid-career.
The following year, with the painting completed but the artist desperate for money – he too, like Matisse, had a family to feed – Cezanne set out to find a buyer. Carrying the work through the streets of Paris, he ran into a friend, Ernest Cabaner, who praised the work. Impulsively the artist gave it to him as a gift. Thus, an image of youthful fellowship became a physical token of friendship. Nor does the knot of personal relations end there. A decade later, in 1886, Zola published his novel The Masterpiece in which he depicted his childhood intimate as a ‘failed’ artist. Following this betrayal, Cezanne never spoke to him again. A decade later, in November 1895, the dealer Ambroise Vollard gave Cezanne his first one-man show in Paris. Bathers at Rest hung not on the wall of his gallery but in the window facing the street. Cezanne’s profoundest concerns, both personal and aesthetic, were exposed, made naked for the world to see.
In this context I want to look at what is arguably the most ambitious and complicated painting by Sands of the four here. Ripley’s Ladder is a vertical canvas showingsome ten bathing figures growing smaller as they move away from us into limpid water. Most are seen from the rear; one at least turns back. The closest, a bearded young man seated in the foreground is cut off by the edge of the canvas at the upper right. It is a motif suggesting the fleeting and instantaneous, like a ‘bad’ snapshot, which painters have explored since the invention of photography – think Edgar Degas. The man observes the entire scene, his gaze, like ours, diving into deep space, calculating the meaning of the relations unfolding in front of him. Is this Ripley? If so, he evokes the ‘hero’ of Patricia Highsmith’s mordant novel, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) of class envy, naked ambition and friendship betrayed. Tension sets in, and yet the beauty and tranquillity of the scene remain unperturbed.
Here I think we see the originality of Sands’s treatment of his bather imagery. If Cezanne most often crowds his figures to the front of the canvas in a relatively small, sometimes claustrophobic landscape, Sands does the opposite. Beaches are broad; sky and water, often similar in silvery tonality, take up far more of the visual field than people. Figures dwindle quickly in size as they move into deep and masterfully controlled perspectival space. (So-called aerial perspective is something of a lost art in landscape painting but Sands revives it here.) Even if people are powerfully present to the artist psychologically – his mother in Rising Skies, his brother in Aldo’s Dream – nature is nonetheless indifferent to them. Sands achieves a thrilling balance between the psychological intensity of his human relations and the placid equanimity of nature. He also, and not without humour, finds a metaphor for a particularly contemporary obliviousness to nature and the near-naked body: in Green Tide Princess, a teenager on the beach in a bikini is indifferent to anything except the latest text pinging in from a friend on her mobile phone, exactly as she would be on a busy street, taking the bus or bored at the back of a classroom.
(1) J. J. Rishel and K. Sachs, Cézanne & Beyond (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Art Museum, 2009), p. 34.
(2) Emil Sands in conversation with Eleanor Nairne, online: https://review.kasmingallery.com/weekend-long-reads/emil-sands-in-conversation-with-eleanor-nairne/.
Christopher Riopelle is The Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London. Text © Christopher Riopelle
Khalif Tahir Thompson: Fiction and the Family Archive
Author
DEBBIE MENIRU
Published
05 November 2025
Debbie Meniru explores the interrelation of lived and imagined experience in the paintings of Khalif Tahir Thompson
Part memory, part archive and part fiction: the characters that occupy Khalif Tahir Thompson’s paintings form what he terms an ‘imagined experience’. Each begins with an image drawn from his grandmother’s extensive collection of photographs. In Street Scene in Bed-Stuy, we see his grandmother’s house in Brooklyn in 1988, seven years before Thompson was born. This was around the time she won the lottery and built a lavish new home in Florida. After his grandmother died in 2006, her boxes of family photo albums were put into storage for sixteen years until Thompson’s sister was finally able to make the road trip down from New York to Florida to retrieve them.
Many of the people the artist selects from the photographs are known to him – his grandmother of course, but also his aunt and sister, a distant relative or a family friend. Some Thompson can’t identify. But in all cases, he isn’t particularly interested in capturing a true likeness or reproducing the original photographic image. He cites the paintings of fellow New York-based artist Alice Neel as an influence, and a similar intimacy can be found in their portrayals. But while Neel documented friends, neighbours and peers posing in her home, Thompson’s subjects are less bound to a specific time or place.
More often than not, Thompson’s figures are captured in vibrant domestic interiors full of texture and pattern. Occasionally the characters venture outside and sometimes they leave the canvas entirely. Sandy in a Striped Shirt is, at first glance, a fairly traditional portrait: a woman, dressed casually in a red-and-white striped top and jeans, sits on a wooden chair from Thompson’s studio. I have the impression she hasn’t done this before – pose for an artist – and she clasps her hands together in her lap, slightly unsure. Behind her is her own reflection. It is as though she sits in front of a mirror, and yet there isn’t one depicted. Once you have noticed the strangeness of this, the work shifts. The painting becomes less about the sitter, and more about the space around her. With no mirror edge, there is no boundary between the real space and the reflected one, and the work folds into the realms of fiction. The woman in the striped top is actually based on a photograph of Sandy, Thompson’s aunt, who never sat for him. In the original image, Sandy is sitting in a pickup truck. By reimagining her in his studio, Thompson imbues the work with what he calls a ‘spiritual element’. When people we know pass away, we often learn about other parts of their lives posthumously, through stories, letters and photographs. We see them through the eyes and experiences of others; we imagine other versions of them co-existing with the one we knew. These other selves were there all along but out of sight, playing around the corner, or caught only as a fleeting reflection.
In this way, Thompson’s work floats across an uncertain chronology. Is what we are seeing a piece of history, located in the past? There are certainly hints that we are looking back: retro decor and outdated fashion, a woman talking on a landline. But Thompson is always looking for ways to insert himself into these images. They are acts of interpretation and imagining, rather than attempts to accurately capture memories in paint. Although rooted in the past, his paintings constantly pull us back to the present moment. This push and pull creates the nostalgia which permeates much of Thompson’s work. It is also heightened by his use of colour. He has long been drawn to what he describes as ‘old fashioned’ hues – reminiscent of the 1970s, but earthier: ochres, burgundies, sap-greens and browns. In works like Pink Clouds, he brings together this warm palette with louder, artificial tones: a bright blue wall, a wacky patchwork quilt, a vibrant fuchsia sky. The contrast distorts the perspective of the composition; the view through the window pushes its way back into the room, rather than falling away into the distance. Thompson’s use of colour is inspired by a gamut of other painters from Claude Monet through Reggie Burrows Hodges and Beauford Delaney to Milton Avery and the German Expressionists.
It was collage that got Thompson to start using colour more confidently. In Cashew, he has applied hand-made Japanese paper to create the plaid pattern on the man’s top, and papyrus is used in the depiction of the wooden coffee table in the left-hand corner. The material acts as both a ‘real thing’ and an illusion within the painting. It is made strange: why use papyrus for a coffee table? But there is always something odd happening in Thompson’s work: an off-kilter angle, a strange repetition, a story below the surface. In Pink Clouds, we appear to have interrupted a private moment between a man sitting on a bed, hunched over, elbows on knees, and a woman pausing in the doorway. I can’t imagine this was the original image caught on camera. Perhaps they have fought, or is she delivering bad news? I’m desperate to see the next scene but Thompson holds us captive in a single moment.
Despite the stillness of Thompson’s figures, the scenes he creates are full of rhythm and repetition. My eyes glide across stripes, dart around brickwork, pulse in quilted squares. Letters and numbers pattern the work. Originally inspired by found text and his interest in characters and form as it relates to language and abstraction, as well as the text that appears in the work of artists such as Kerry James Marshall, the markings here act as disruptors, challenging a simple reading of the composition. The symbols float in the air, decorate walls, deepen shadows and cling to the surface of the canvas. As with the other collaged elements, they challenge the illusory space of the painting, making its physicality come to the fore. These symbols aren’t supposed to be deciphered. They force us to look beyond our desire to decode. To me, they seem like signs of life or perhaps an untold story, while Thompson has described them as ‘visual noise’. Like musical notes, they bring rhythm and sound to the paintings. Not a clear 4/4 beat but moments of syncopation, heady emotional swells and quiet refrains. They suggest more is at play than we are able to comprehend just by looking. Thompson asks us to imagine too.
Debbie Meniru is an independent writer, editor and curator based in London. She was previously Assistant Curator of Research & Interpretation at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London.
Text © Debbie Meniru