Lananh Le: Image Sampling and the Construction of Personal Cosmology in the Digital Generation
Lananh Le (1993–2020) was a Vietnamese contemporary artist who grew up in Ho Chi Minh City. Her practice spanned painting, collage, and digital imagery. She received an international school education during her secondary years and later received a degree in Comparative Studies at Stanford University, where she participated in the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program. This academic background, encompassing ethnicity studies, history, religion, literature, and writing, formed the foundation for her later cross-cultural and cross-textual approach. During her time in the United States, she was involved in social justice initiatives and encountered discussions on art as a tool for psychological healing, which led her to develop a practice centered on constructed worlds grounded in lived practices and intangible spiritual experience.
In contrast to Vietnamese artists born before the 1980s, Lananh did not directly respond to political structures or historical narratives. Instead, she turned toward the visualization of inner experience, employing “universal images” to articulate her mental and spiritual world. The term is used to indicate a body of visual material not confined to a single cultural or national framework, but drawn from widely circulating sources across mythologies, popular imagery, and art historical references. She was self taught and was not affiliated with any artistic collective, and her work presents a highly individualized cosmology, unfolding in a mode that resembles a solitary discourse. This orientation reflects the position of artists born within a globalized and digitized environment, where individual experience and psychological structures become primary points of departure, rather than national or institutional concerns. Also engaging in poetry, Lananh treated it as a shared vessel through which images and language could move across media boundaries.
Her artistic practice focused on constructing a “personal cosmology” through layered systems of collage and painting. These images bring together mythology, nature, ecology, and culture, gradually forming an ongoing project centered on oral history, the collective unconscious, and public memories. Her works frequently incorporate mythological figures, traditional Dong Ho woodblock imagery, hybrid creatures, botanical forms, and spatial structures that disrupt linear perspective, producing a visual language situated between dream and narrative. Time and space within the image are restructured and edited, forming a non linear temporal and historical condition that she termed “Frozen Data.” This concept refers to the ways in which images are archived and re-mediated under digital conditions, and functions as both a conceptual framework and a working method. As Lananh described, it is an experimentation with the digital medium, and an exercise in collecting high-brow images of art history from the public domain as well as low-brow images from clip art sites. Her process did not follow a fixed logic but instead relies on intuition and the unconscious, resulting in a non linear mode of image generation. She developed a personal system of collecting visual materials, continuously drawing from diverse cultural sources as the basis of her work. She also acknowledged the influence of artists and writers including Faye Wei Wei, Leonora Carrington, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, and Octavia Butler, indicating that her work does not emerge from a singular cultural lineage but operates through translation and recombination across multiple artistic systems.
As she noted, “Cultural memories coalesce in a collective global pool of symbolic imagery.”
Lananh adopted digital collage from an early stage, combining mythologies from East and West, cartoon images, historical references, and scientific illustrations, including sources such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海經), as well as botanical and entomological materials. In her later work, elements of everyday life such as architecture and furniture began to appear, interwoven with mythological imagery to form layered visual structures that bridge past and present. Her compositions are typically dense, with imagery occupying nearly the entire surface, leaving little empty space and producing a continuous sense of accumulation. Her use of color is characterized by high saturation and thick application, often carrying a humid and fluid quality. A recurring pink violet tone appears throughout her work, functioning as a distinct chromatic marker of her inner world.
In her 2019 solo exhibition Frozen Data in Ho Chi Minh City, Lananh transformed a large number of paintings into a long duration video sequence. The 12 hour projection presents a continuously generated and uninterrupted flow of images, revealing the density and richness of her visual language. She also indicated that her future direction would involve further exploration through writing, analysis, research, storyboarding, and fieldwork in order to deepen the symbolic structures within her references.
Her sketches and notebooks constituted an important part of her practice. These works are characterized by dense lines and layered markings, with recurring human figures and highly irregular compositional rhythms. Such imagery relates to her sustained attention to mental states, including inner chaos, healing, and the search for spiritual equilibrium. Her research also engaged with artistic practices associated with mental illness, reflecting an ongoing awareness of psychological experience.
Lananh passed away in 2020. Within a short period, her work established a highly individualized and structurally complex system of images, combining the conditions of the digital age with the reconfiguration of mythological narratives, and marking a distinct direction within contemporary Vietnamese art that departs from earlier historical frameworks.
2026.04.23 Julian Chu
Image Courtesy of Dat Vu