Inman Gallery is pleased to present If Memory Serves, a solo exhibition of new work by Loc Huynh, on view May 16 – July 3, 2026. Please join us for an exhibition walkthrough with the artist on Saturday, May 16 at 1:00pm, followed by an opening reception from 2:00–4:00pm. This event celebrates a concurrent solo exhibition by Yevgeniya Baras.
Loc Huynh draws from the visual language of Pop and traditional genre painting to create scenes that explore diasporic Asian American identity and cultural hybridity. His technical practice blends airbrush techniques – a highly mechanical mark – with more painterly modes, taping off forms to create flat, crisp lines with smooth volumetric renderings. The resulting images are highly graphic and often biographical, with a nostalgic tone and playful tenor.
If Memory Serves presents recent paintings that trace Huynh’s family’s arrival to the United States from Vietnam in the 1980s, and growing up in Austin, Texas in the 1990s. Using his own archive of family photos as source material, Huynh captures tender snapshots of family dinners, birthday parties, and summer vacations. Between these vignettes, cheery portraits of the artist’s mom wearing sunglasses are interspersed with more solemn self-portraits of the artist as a child. The images are taken both from life in Austin and a family trip to Vietnam. Certain settings are easily recognizable as Texas – Lake Travis, Six-Flags, and suburban driveways, for example – while in others, the location is intentionally ambiguous.
Freely merging family photographs with art historical references, Huynh challenges the perception that photography is a wholly accurate representation of a particular moment. As both subject and maker, Huynh takes aesthetic liberties in translating his compositions, allowing new interventions to imbue nuanced truths and emotional resonance. The resulting paintings are streamlined with the clarity of adulthood, asserting agency over what gets remembered, and why. In addition to photographs, the works harken back to the legacy of genre painting in their generous renderings of everyday life (for example, The Grown-Up’s Table [2024] takesinspiration from The Potato Eaters [1885] by Vincent Van Gogh). Spanning three years, the works show an increasing use of hand painting alongside airbrush technique. The artist’s mark-making becomes more immediate as the subject matter becomes more sympathetic.
By nature of the source material, the works are tender and personal, evoking nostalgia through a discerning lens. Seemingly idealized scenes of a quintessential, American childhood are complicated by the larger contexts that place the artist’s family in the United States as refugees. Branded logos appear in several paintings, both as aspirational symbols of assimilation and a reminder that the Americana aesthetic is largely dictated by Western consumerism (importantly, at the expense of the Global South). Leveraging the depiction of his own childhood naivety, Huynh gestures towards these contradictions, illustrating how family histories are intertwined with geopolitical theatre. Nevertheless, his work retains a moving intimacy: the simple and profound act of painting someone you love.
Loc Huynh (b. 1992, Austin, TX) holds a BFA from Texas State University (2016) and an MFA from the University of North Texas (2020). Select solo exhibitions include the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (Beaumont, TX), Museum of the Southwest (Midland, TX), Martha’s Contemporary (Austin TX), and New Release Gallery (New York) among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Asia Society (Houston, TX); Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA), DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (Washington, DC); Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, FL); Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio, TX); and Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), among others. He has participated in the Vermont Studio Center Residency (Johnson, VT) and was part of the Lawndale Artist Studio Program (Houston). Huynh lives and works in New York, NY.
