Kwinnie Lê is an artist, researcher, poet and shapeshifter. Drawing from mythology, folklore and oral histories, they situate ancestral traditions within contemporary urban life, aiming to re-suture narratives of classification. Currently, they’re investigating the revival and revitalization movement of traditional tattoo practices. "The Land of the Tattooed", the name borrowed from an ancient state of Vietnam, is an ongoing world-building project that employs semi-fictional narratives and critical speculation to render tattoo histories within a contemporary art canon. This body of work engages with a myriad of themes such as its historical utility to classify the colonized, contemporary practices of exclusion and the planetary crisis. Although rooted in painful and erased histories, fiction becomes a tool to arrive at uncompromising hope. As a practitioner of skin marking, their work aligns with the Vietnamese ancestral tradition specifically. The works are manifested in performances, textile and storytelling, though traversing into many more forms.