Quyen Dinh, 32, doesn’t want you to analyze her art. She doesn’t want you to look at it and think about what kind of statement she is making concerning the role of women in society or the immigrant experience in America or The Way We Live Today. That’s not to say that she doesn’t want to you to think about anything when you view her art. She does. Mostly she wants you to think about her.
In her artist statement Dinh, who sculpts and paints her acrylic-on-canvas pieces when she isn’t working 40 hours a week as a parking-control officer in Orange County, California, writes, “Making art for me has always been pure catharsis … The characters in my paintings are, for the most part, self-portraits of my inner self. So when people see my work, rather than wanting them to think about them, I’d like for them to just feel the very things that bring me nostalgia from what could be memories from past lives, things that give me peace, and also the things that make me melancholy.”
Viewing Dinh’s art is like viewing a visual autobiography of her triumphs and her losses, of her frustrations and her joys, of her very real human emotions, which she inevitably shares with our own. But she didn’t start telling her story until 2004, when a birthday gift she made for a friend inspired her to transition from black-and-white “hyperrealistic portraits” to acrylic paints.
Those now-trademark vivid acrylic colors paired with universal themes like loss, lust and spirituality characterize most of Dinh’s paintings, but it’s the broader theme of innocence – and the subsequent lack of it – that encompasses her work and makes it unique. In one of her paintings, you might see a child delivering a eulogy for a dead goldfish to a circle of stuffed animals, while in the next, you’ll see a woman with smoky eyes and a ‘20s hairdo staring out at you with a withering expression—almost as if she is daring you to say something―as another woman clad only in a bustier grasps her from behind.
However different they might seem, both those paintings’ characters are representations of Dinh herself. “I’ve dealt with so many losses of pets, at young ages, too. And the strong female characters show another side of me, as a lesbian,” she says (Dinh’s been out since the age of 16). “I love the way flappers look; they’re so beautiful and elegant and stylish. There’s an innocence and something very sexy about them.”
Like the characters she paints, Dinh exudes her own paradoxical sense of innocence. “When I meet people I always say I’m so innocent, and I do feel very innocent. People always say ‘Oh yeah, look at all your tattoos,’ but you can’t judge a book by its cover. When you look at these tattoos – it’s art. It’s just me using art to express who I am.”
She uses tattoos in her paintings just like she uses them on her body. In one, a porcelain woman stares solemnly from the center of the canvas while her body acts as a subsequent one, with a tattoo of a heart with wings centered on her chest and a broken heart and the words “R.I.P.” on her arms. You don’t have to read the title of the painting – which happens to be “Memorial” – to know that this woman is grieving. In another painting, “The Adventurer,” a boy clad in nautical gear and surrounded by tentacles stands next to a giant pelican as a ship approaches in the background. Fully clothed, he has just one tattoo visible – a ship anchor.
Dinh’s upcoming projects include a second collection of paintings focused on “tattoo art.” “It’s going to be called ‘The Second Coming,’ a collection of people and children with tattoos that tells messages and stories through them – mainly about spirituality and making you think beyond this life,” she says.
As a recent University of Southern California film grad, she’s also tossing around the idea of making a documentary – if she can find a good subject. “Everything’s kind of been covered… nothing’s original anymore. I really want to do something that’s socially powerful and something that’s worth watching.” Until she figures out what that is, we’ll have to be content with her paintings: each one like a mini-documentary in itself, one that is decidedly worth watching.
Check out more of Quyen Dinh’s art on her website at Quyen-Dinh.com.
