Kwinnie Lê

Lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands

Artist statement

I am an artist, researcher, poet and shapeshifter. Drawing from mythology, folklore and oral histories, they situate ancestral traditions within contemporary urban life. Currently, my research revolves around the revival movement of ancestral skin marking (“tattoo”) traditions. In an ongoing world-building project "The Land of the Tattooed", the name borrowed from an ancient state of Vietnam, semi-fictional narratives and critical speculation are employed. This body of work confronts the epistemicide of skin-marking traditions and meditates on their repair. It examines, for instance, the historical use of tattoos for colonial classification, the weaponisation of tattoo traditions in the rejection of ornament in modernist architecture and the potential of ancestral wisdom to engage with the planetary crisis. Although rooted in erased histories, fiction becomes a tool to arrive at uncompromising hope. As a practitioner of skin marking, I am working on the revival of the Vietnamese ancestral marking tradition. The works are manifested in performances, textile and storytelling, though traversing into many more forms.

Artwork