Dinh Q. Lê (B. 1968)
a.k.a. Lê Quang Đỉnh
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Dinh Q. Lê is a multi-disciplinary artist who has created installations, videos, sculptures, photographs (including woven photomontages) and urban interventions. His postmodernist approach interconnects Western and Vietnamese culture to create forms and images that establish new form of history and critical narrative for postwar Vietnamese culture.
Dinh Q. Lê was born at the height of the Viet Nam war in Ha Tien, a large seaside town in Kien Giang Province in Southern Vietnam near the Cambodian border. The artist’s early memories of the Viet Nam War later provided the subject matter of his mature works. Art making has served as a way for Lê to remember, understand and come to terms with the traumas that shaped his personal life, the life of his family and the broader culture of Vietnam.
At the age of ten Lê moved to Southern California with his family as a refugee. Not yet fluent in English, Lê spent a great deal of time at the library, looking at art books and images of European Old Master paintings that heightened his interest in art. Lê eventually earned a BFA degree in Photography from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UC Santa Barbara, he attended a large lecture class about the Viet Nam war that included talks by American Viet Nam War veterans.
The realization that there were not Vietnamese speakers available to talk about the war reopened Lê’s curiosity and eventually inspired him to become a voice for a new Vietnamese perspective. As a result, his first public art project Accountability, consisted of a series of posters that Lê put up on the college campus, juxtaposing American media images of the Vietnam War with explicit pictures of Vietnamese suffering, and captions detailing the damage.
After graduation Lê made his first photo-weavings (montages) and then entered the School of Visual Arts in New York City where in 1992 he earned an MFA degree in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts. He returned to Vietnam for the first time in 1993, first living in his hometown and then, after alternating between Los Angeles and Vietnam, he settled in Ho Chi Minh City in 1996. Lê initially found the local communities “rather unwelcoming” as he was considered Viet Kieu or “overseas Vietnamese.
One of Lê’s early projects, ”Cambodia, Splendor and Darkness,1996-98” took shape after he visited the Tuol Sieng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. The Khmer Rhouge—who had invaded Lê’s hometown when he was a child—had used this location as torture and detention center where confessions had been forced from some 20,000 Cambodians who were then executed. Moved by photos of detainees found in this museum, Lê interwove photos of the dead with photos of bas-relief images found at the ancient temple of Angkor Wat. Using the bamboo mat weaving methods he had once learned from his aunt, these montages juxtapose and re-contextualize to periods of Cambodian history, creating a new form of memorial across time and history.
A project that soon followed in 1998 was “Mot Coi Di Ve” (“Spending one’s life trying to find one’s way back home”). It consists of a hanging quilt of some 1,500 old photos of Vietnam that the artist inscribed on the reverse with lines from the 19th century epic poem “The Tale of Kieu,” texts from letters sent home by American soldiers during the Vietnam war and interviews with Vietnamese Americans.
In an attempt to raise public awareness about the residual effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Lê then organized Damaged Gene (1998), a temporary public art project in Ho Chi Minh City’s central market. The project revolved around a small shop selling evidence of atrocity, such as specially produced clothing and pacifiers for conjoined twins and T-shirts informing people about the dangers of Dioxin.
The “Texture of Memory” documents the widespread cases of PTSD experienced by Cambodian refugees in Sothern California. In over 200 instances, women who had witnessed atrocities in Cambodia later developed hysterical blindness. This series, which consists of embroidered portraits of prisoners held at Tuol Sleng detention center, were embroidered into Braille-like textures by skilled Vietnamese craftswomen supervised by the artist.
Lê’s series From Vietnam to Hollywood (2003), contrasts photojournalistic images of the Vietnam War and with the war’s depiction in Hollywood movies. Employing his photo-weaving technique, Lê intermingled iconic images of the war, mixing found and personal photographs with film stills to create large-scale works. In 2003, six works from this series were included in the 50th annual Venice Biennale.
In collaboration with Tran Quoc Hai, Le Van Danh, Phu-Nam Thuc Ha, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Lê created the installation “Farmers and Helicopters” in 2006 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This installation centered on a boxy handmade helicopter inspired by a newspaper article Lê read in 2004 about a self-taught Vietnamese mechanic who built a helicopter from scrap in a remote Vietnamese village. The theme of this installation, inspired by the mechanic’s project, was to demonstrate the way that the helicopter could be transformed from a symbol of war to an image of healing and community building.
In 2006 Lê helped co-founded the ‘Vietnam Foundation for the Arts’ (VNFA) based in Los Angeles. It is an organization that supports Vietnamese artists and promotes artistic exchange between cultural workers from Vietnam and around the world. With funding from VNFA, Lê co-founded San Art with three other Vietnamese artists (Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Phù Nam Thúc Hà and Tiffany Chung). It is the first not for profit gallery in Ho Chi Minh City.
In 2011 The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia commissioned and exhibited Erasure, an interactive sculptural and video installation that draws on recent debates in Australia concerning refugees and asylum seekers.
Lê’s 2017 exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, “The Scrolls, Distortion,” features scrolls of photo-montages pertaining to the conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia printed onto continuous scrolls of paper up to 164 feet long. Draped on metal rods high overhead, the scrolls unfurl into curls and ripples on platforms set just a few inches above the floor.
Dinh Q. Lê is an active artist who continues to make vital and challenging work. He lives and works in a four-story home and studio that is a 25-minute drive from the center of Ho Chi Minh City.
Dinh Q. Lê was born at the height of the Viet Nam war in Ha Tien, a large seaside town in Kien Giang Province in Southern Vietnam near the Cambodian border. The artist’s early memories of the Viet Nam War later provided the subject matter of his mature works. Art making has served as a way for Lê to remember, understand and come to terms with the traumas that shaped his personal life, the life of his family and the broader culture of Vietnam.
At the age of ten Lê moved to Southern California with his family as a refugee. Not yet fluent in English, Lê spent a great deal of time at the library, looking at art books and images of European Old Master paintings that heightened his interest in art. Lê eventually earned a BFA degree in Photography from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UC Santa Barbara, he attended a large lecture class about the Viet Nam war that included talks by American Viet Nam War veterans.
The realization that there were not Vietnamese speakers available to talk about the war reopened Lê’s curiosity and eventually inspired him to become a voice for a new Vietnamese perspective. As a result, his first public art project Accountability, consisted of a series of posters that Lê put up on the college campus, juxtaposing American media images of the Vietnam War with explicit pictures of Vietnamese suffering, and captions detailing the damage.
After graduation Lê made his first photo-weavings (montages) and then entered the School of Visual Arts in New York City where in 1992 he earned an MFA degree in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts. He returned to Vietnam for the first time in 1993, first living in his hometown and then, after alternating between Los Angeles and Vietnam, he settled in Ho Chi Minh City in 1996. Lê initially found the local communities “rather unwelcoming” as he was considered Viet Kieu or “overseas Vietnamese.
One of Lê’s early projects, ”Cambodia, Splendor and Darkness,1996-98” took shape after he visited the Tuol Sieng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. The Khmer Rhouge—who had invaded Lê’s hometown when he was a child—had used this location as torture and detention center where confessions had been forced from some 20,000 Cambodians who were then executed. Moved by photos of detainees found in this museum, Lê interwove photos of the dead with photos of bas-relief images found at the ancient temple of Angkor Wat. Using the bamboo mat weaving methods he had once learned from his aunt, these montages juxtapose and re-contextualize to periods of Cambodian history, creating a new form of memorial across time and history.
A project that soon followed in 1998 was “Mot Coi Di Ve” (“Spending one’s life trying to find one’s way back home”). It consists of a hanging quilt of some 1,500 old photos of Vietnam that the artist inscribed on the reverse with lines from the 19th century epic poem “The Tale of Kieu,” texts from letters sent home by American soldiers during the Vietnam war and interviews with Vietnamese Americans.
In an attempt to raise public awareness about the residual effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Lê then organized Damaged Gene (1998), a temporary public art project in Ho Chi Minh City’s central market. The project revolved around a small shop selling evidence of atrocity, such as specially produced clothing and pacifiers for conjoined twins and T-shirts informing people about the dangers of Dioxin.
The “Texture of Memory” documents the widespread cases of PTSD experienced by Cambodian refugees in Sothern California. In over 200 instances, women who had witnessed atrocities in Cambodia later developed hysterical blindness. This series, which consists of embroidered portraits of prisoners held at Tuol Sleng detention center, were embroidered into Braille-like textures by skilled Vietnamese craftswomen supervised by the artist.
Lê’s series From Vietnam to Hollywood (2003), contrasts photojournalistic images of the Vietnam War and with the war’s depiction in Hollywood movies. Employing his photo-weaving technique, Lê intermingled iconic images of the war, mixing found and personal photographs with film stills to create large-scale works. In 2003, six works from this series were included in the 50th annual Venice Biennale.
In collaboration with Tran Quoc Hai, Le Van Danh, Phu-Nam Thuc Ha, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Lê created the installation “Farmers and Helicopters” in 2006 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This installation centered on a boxy handmade helicopter inspired by a newspaper article Lê read in 2004 about a self-taught Vietnamese mechanic who built a helicopter from scrap in a remote Vietnamese village. The theme of this installation, inspired by the mechanic’s project, was to demonstrate the way that the helicopter could be transformed from a symbol of war to an image of healing and community building.
In 2006 Lê helped co-founded the ‘Vietnam Foundation for the Arts’ (VNFA) based in Los Angeles. It is an organization that supports Vietnamese artists and promotes artistic exchange between cultural workers from Vietnam and around the world. With funding from VNFA, Lê co-founded San Art with three other Vietnamese artists (Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Phù Nam Thúc Hà and Tiffany Chung). It is the first not for profit gallery in Ho Chi Minh City.
In 2011 The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia commissioned and exhibited Erasure, an interactive sculptural and video installation that draws on recent debates in Australia concerning refugees and asylum seekers.
Lê’s 2017 exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, “The Scrolls, Distortion,” features scrolls of photo-montages pertaining to the conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia printed onto continuous scrolls of paper up to 164 feet long. Draped on metal rods high overhead, the scrolls unfurl into curls and ripples on platforms set just a few inches above the floor.
Dinh Q. Lê is an active artist who continues to make vital and challenging work. He lives and works in a four-story home and studio that is a 25-minute drive from the center of Ho Chi Minh City.