September 19, 2024
Dinh Q. Lê
Survey 1998 - 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
August 27 - October 11, 2024
Dinh Q. Lê
The Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê tragically passed away from a stroke in April 2024 at the age of 56 in Ho Chi Minh City. He was best known for his woven photographs that juxtaposed historical, pop culture and contemporary imagery about the Viet Nam War. In these complex and visually compelling mixed media works, he explored subjects ranging from memory and myth to personal and cultural identities. Incorporating the tradition of grass-weaving, a skill he learned as a child from an aunt in Viet Nam (his family left in 1978), he combined stills from Hollywood films about Viet Nam with journalistic images. Although he continually shifted and delved deeper into different aspects of the past, both real and imagined, how the war, the county and its people were remembered and represented in the West continued to be a motivating factor in his work.
Spanning his career, the exhibition begins with an early non-woven work Headless Buddha (1998), an image of a headless buddha, shot on location in a majestic temple. This backlit light box image is juxtaposed with a disembodied cement Buddha's head resting on a pedestal, staring at its headless representation.
While this work is the anomaly, it sets the stage for Lê's explorations into the relationship between relics, ruins and memory. Bookending the survey is Cambodia-Reamker #36 (2023), a large woven photograph that is 86 inches wide. Here, Lê fuses images from the Reamker, Cambodia’s version of the Sanskrit Ramayana, an epic poem about the balance between good and evil, with portraits of prisoners from the Khmer Rouge’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. Lê traveled to Cambodia and photographed the murals at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. In this series, he weaves his imagery of these colorful and delicate murals with close cropped black and white reproductions that focus on the faces of the young condemned prisoners.
In works such as Dismantling Icons (2003) or Untitled 3 (2004), Lê takes brightly colored stills from Hollywood films about the Viet Nam War such as "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now" and "Born on the Fourth of July" and combines them with black and white images documenting the war by photojournalists. In many of these compositions, patterns appear within the weaving that become a third layer adding both formal and content. In this case, Lê works with his own photographs as well as appropriating from various sources. The pieces often combine black and white historical images with more intensely colored film stills or images culled from consumer and popular culture.
In Double Distorted Portraits (2017), large eyes come in and out of focus as the viewer moves between black and white images of two child prisoners and a fiery red-orange background that surrounds them. Similarly, in Night Vision (2008), the eye and the mind transition from foreground to background images while oscillating between hues of green, black and white that reveal a hovering helicopter, soldiers, and victims of war. Again, Lê brings together past and present while alluding to the (sadly) unavoidable and (seemingly) ever-present conditions of war.
Integral to his process is the study of history and culture. He purposely uses fragments and representations from different sources and is aware that his reconstructions only offer an incomplete "whole." Lê's works were not only about the conflict in Viet Nam; he also brought imagery from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into his later compositions. Through appropriation — of a craft (weaving) and imagery — Lê developed a unique process that allowed the fragmentation and the reconstruction of different genres and eras to rewrite history and show the discrepancies between fantasy, memory and reality.
We can never know where Lê’s abbreviated body of work may have gone from here. Even so, this survey exhibition is more than just a celebration of his creativity. It features aspects of his work which makes a strong case that it will remain influential and significant as time goes on.
Survey 1998 - 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
August 27 - October 11, 2024
Dinh Q. Lê
The Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê tragically passed away from a stroke in April 2024 at the age of 56 in Ho Chi Minh City. He was best known for his woven photographs that juxtaposed historical, pop culture and contemporary imagery about the Viet Nam War. In these complex and visually compelling mixed media works, he explored subjects ranging from memory and myth to personal and cultural identities. Incorporating the tradition of grass-weaving, a skill he learned as a child from an aunt in Viet Nam (his family left in 1978), he combined stills from Hollywood films about Viet Nam with journalistic images. Although he continually shifted and delved deeper into different aspects of the past, both real and imagined, how the war, the county and its people were remembered and represented in the West continued to be a motivating factor in his work.
Spanning his career, the exhibition begins with an early non-woven work Headless Buddha (1998), an image of a headless buddha, shot on location in a majestic temple. This backlit light box image is juxtaposed with a disembodied cement Buddha's head resting on a pedestal, staring at its headless representation.
While this work is the anomaly, it sets the stage for Lê's explorations into the relationship between relics, ruins and memory. Bookending the survey is Cambodia-Reamker #36 (2023), a large woven photograph that is 86 inches wide. Here, Lê fuses images from the Reamker, Cambodia’s version of the Sanskrit Ramayana, an epic poem about the balance between good and evil, with portraits of prisoners from the Khmer Rouge’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. Lê traveled to Cambodia and photographed the murals at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. In this series, he weaves his imagery of these colorful and delicate murals with close cropped black and white reproductions that focus on the faces of the young condemned prisoners.
In works such as Dismantling Icons (2003) or Untitled 3 (2004), Lê takes brightly colored stills from Hollywood films about the Viet Nam War such as "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now" and "Born on the Fourth of July" and combines them with black and white images documenting the war by photojournalists. In many of these compositions, patterns appear within the weaving that become a third layer adding both formal and content. In this case, Lê works with his own photographs as well as appropriating from various sources. The pieces often combine black and white historical images with more intensely colored film stills or images culled from consumer and popular culture.
In Double Distorted Portraits (2017), large eyes come in and out of focus as the viewer moves between black and white images of two child prisoners and a fiery red-orange background that surrounds them. Similarly, in Night Vision (2008), the eye and the mind transition from foreground to background images while oscillating between hues of green, black and white that reveal a hovering helicopter, soldiers, and victims of war. Again, Lê brings together past and present while alluding to the (sadly) unavoidable and (seemingly) ever-present conditions of war.
Integral to his process is the study of history and culture. He purposely uses fragments and representations from different sources and is aware that his reconstructions only offer an incomplete "whole." Lê's works were not only about the conflict in Viet Nam; he also brought imagery from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into his later compositions. Through appropriation — of a craft (weaving) and imagery — Lê developed a unique process that allowed the fragmentation and the reconstruction of different genres and eras to rewrite history and show the discrepancies between fantasy, memory and reality.
We can never know where Lê’s abbreviated body of work may have gone from here. Even so, this survey exhibition is more than just a celebration of his creativity. It features aspects of his work which makes a strong case that it will remain influential and significant as time goes on.