Join us in celebration of the opening of Le Hien Minh’s exhibition, Lotusthetics.
Lotusthetics
work by by Le Hien Minh
September 6 – 28, 2025
on view Sundays
11 a – 2 p
At Comfort Station, Le Hien Minh presents her newest moving image work, Lotusthetics. This layered visual collage is composed of hundreds of images drawn from a wide range of sources, including Hollywood films, news media, historical archives, celebrity culture and spiritual iconography from both American and Vietnamese contexts.
Asian women in the United States are often viewed through a reductive lens due to their minority status and limited representation in popular culture. Portrayals frequently rely on narrow cultural touch-points or trope, including Orientalist and Ornamentalist stereotypes such as the “Dragon Lady.” Lotusthetics interrogates and reconfigures these American cultural symbols of female Asian-ness, combining them with imagery from the Vietnamese contexts.
Le Hien Minh weaves these visuals together to create stark juxtapositions between disparate worldviews. The legacy of the Vietnam War serves as a bridge, connecting these two perspectives. The result is a surreal, sometimes jarring meditation that transcends familiar symbols to evoke something new—what Minh terms a “matriarchal vision.”
Le Hien Minh is a Vietnamese artist currently based in Chicago, whose work is deeply shaped by her experiences growing up in post-war Vietnam. Coming of age in a war- torn country during a period of nation-building, marked by a myriad of political and cultural shifts throughout the 1980s and 1990s, profoundly influenced her artistic vision. These formative experiences continue to inspire her to create work that critically engages with social issues and explores alternative cultural paradigms, envisioning realities beyond the current framework of patriarchy. Rooted in these influences, Minh seeks to create experiences that invite viewers to ponder the fluid relationship between actuality and potentiality, between what is and what could be. Central to her current practice is the female experience, through which she intricately weaves socio-historical and cultural narratives. Her contemplative yet provocative work blends mystical and spiritual elements with metaphysical and surrealist concepts, encouraging reflection on the complex interplay between the tangible and the intangible, as well as the visible and invisible systems that shape and govern our lives.
Highlight exhibitions include the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts, Sculpture Expanded by the Association of Finnish Sculptors in Helsinki, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocular Magazine, and Chicago Reader, among others. Recent fellowships and grants include awards from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Goethe-Institut, the 3Arts Ignite Fund, and the Chicago Cultural Grant (DCASE).