Charles Ly

Charles Ly creates oil paintings which slip and slide between realistic and surreal registers. Sources of inspiration for the artist are family, food, and the city of Rạch Giá in Vietnam, where his family emigrated to America from. Each body of work functions like a photo album. Intimate tableaux of families eating together meet quotidian scenes of butchers at work, or the sun setting across busy city centres. With a great sense of care, immense detail will go into the folds of a dumpling, the ornate patterns of a noodle bowl or a floral print on a family member’s pyjamas. Seemingly operating in a plane of memory rather than direct portrayals, the paintings are sensorially rich. This rousing, atmospheric quality is dramatically heightened through his works portraying surreal and otherworldly depictions. In these contrasting pieces, Ly plays with scale and context, placing boxes of spring rolls like floating ships afloat in seas, with hands holding chopsticks reaching down from the clouds. The fluidity between these two painterly styles imaginatively stretches ideas surrounding commerce, culture and diaspora which feed his practice.