Portrait of Charles Ly by Jessica Dalene.
Still grappling with the success of his first solo show last year at Harper’s Chelsea 534, the East Hampton-based Vietnamese-American painter Charles Ly tells me he’s “dealing with the imposter syndrome” that comes with new attention. “People liked my work, but it was my first big show.”
Ly’s oeuvre includes slightly surreal figurative paintings that spotlight Vietnamese people, culture, and food. The artist’s charming downplaying of his success aside, Cháo, 2021, and Xe Lua, 2021, which appeared in the Harper’s exhibition, are stirring works laced with a bit of comic relief. We see in them the metaphorical hands of God reaching down from the heavens into bowls of pho and volcanic hot pots surrounded by skewers of vegetables ready to attack.
“The soups serve as metaphors for melting pots, metaphors for our world,” says Ly. He explains that he went to Vietnam for the first time five years ago. “Growing up Vietnamese in rural America, food is the thing you connect to from your heritage,” he says. “Going [to Vietnam] reaffirmed who I was on a cellular level."
We continue to mull over our shared experiences as members of our respective diasporas, food never far from the focus. “When my mom calls, she starts every conversation with ‘Have you eaten?’" says Ly, laughing. "In our culture, we express our emotions through food.”
The artist, 39, grew up in the art-rich community of East Hampton. “Willem de Kooning, Chuck Close, and Andy Warhol had places here. They still have estates here,” he says. The deep artistic roots of the area provide plenty of inspiration to him now, but even though he was “very much surrounded by art as a kid,” he wasn’t always aware of it. “I was more into comics and video games, watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and trying to copy them on paper,” he says. “I was always trying to put myself in those worlds."
Ly trained as a graphic designer, but after a few unfulfilling years, he says he found the screen time too taxing. Instead, he turned to painting and drawing. He is currently preparing a new body of work for his next solo show, set to open in 2024 at Harper’s Los Angeles. When asked how he feels about spending time in his studio this summer, Ly laughs. “The hardest part of being an artist is being inside on a nice day,” he says. “I’m on an island after all—I like to surf whenever there are waves. I try to be in nature as much as possible, so [studio work] is like torture"—Elisha Tawe