Philadelphia, PN
Anh Ly has many difficult tales to tell, based on her densely-markered drawings of people living through the scourge of online child sexual exploitation. These are complicated, messy compositions, hard to look at, challenging to make sense of, and totally clear in their nightmarish implications. But Ly has plenty of other styles and subjects, too, from Vietnamese food (tastily illustrated with clever stylization) to rebels living underground in the jungle (think storybook cut-away section) to the numbers 1-9 (as expressed by a very flexible nude woman). One especially winning series features a bevy of geishas, all sharp lines and sinuous curves, playing baseball, doing backflips, flying a skateboard, pumping big iron, ice skating a spread eagle, and scaling a climbing wall, all while sporting kimonos, obis and those Geiko Shimada wigs. Tokyo Olympics 2032?
—Lori Waxman 10/13/2023 4:56 PM