For Vietnamese Americans, Vietnam is the place of memories, of an easier time when they “belonged.” For some this has meant that a degree of idealism has set in, as it does for other diasporic communities.
Dinh Q. Lê, in an interview with Melissa Chiu, in Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium (New York: Asia Society, 2005), 21.
Dinh Q. Lê has amassed an archive including some “200 kilos”1 of found photographs, a collection of watercolors and drawings by artists in the Northern Vietnamese army, Vietnamese ceramics, and antiques from Southeast Asia dating back two thousand years. While his collecting interests often develop into artworks—including Light and Belief (2012) and Crossing the Farther Shore (2014)—for Lê, collecting objects “is a way to connect to a longer history.”2 Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, a small town in the south of Vietnam near the border with Cambodia, he grew up with objects passed from generation to generation. He and his family left everything behind when they escaped in 1978 for Thailand and immigrated as refugees to the United States in 1979. In 1994 Lê began going back regularly to Vietnam and Southeast Asia, collecting objects along the way. When he moved back permanently in 1997, his collections—such as the works on paper by Viet Cong artists—became a mode through which he learned about the country’s lesser-known histories and the voices marginalized by dominant historical narratives.
Dinh Q. Lê, in an interview with Moira Roth, October 28, 2017–March 9, 2018, in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, ed. Rory Padeken (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2019), 23. ↩︎
Dinh Q. Lê, in an interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in Dinh Q. Lê (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 3. ↩︎
On one of his visits back to Vietnam in the mid-1990s, Dinh Q. Lê came across several shops on the antiques street of Saigon where merchants sold found black-and-white photographs of people from South Vietnam. The artist was struck by their vernacular aesthetic—they reminded him of his own childhood in Vietnam and validated a past that had been largely disappeared by the North Vietnamese Communist government after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. He began collecting thousands of such photographs hoping to find his own family records, which had been left behind when they fled Vietnam in 1978. The photographs, which became a kind of “surrogate family”1 album, would feed into the work Crossing the Farther Shore (2014), which features colossal rectangular structures made of photographs strung together into ethereal forms that allude to the mosquito nets the artist slept beneath as a child. “To preserve it is to give it value,” the artist says of this photographic archive. “Now that it is art, it will be preserved and protected.”2
Dinh Q. Lê, in Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, “Reclaiming Home: Dinh Q. Lê’s Artistic Journey in Vietnam,” in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, ed. Rory Padeken (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2019), 61. ↩︎
Dinh Q. Lê, in Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, “Reclaiming Home: Dinh Q. Lê’s Artistic Journey in Vietnam,” in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, ed. Rory Padeken (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2019), 61. ↩︎
As a Vietnamese immigrant growing up in Southern California, Dinh Q. Lê watched Hollywood films to learn English. Though he tried to avoid Vietnam War films, epics like The Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) inundated the big screen and the American consciousness; as Lê recalls, the iconic film Apocalypse Now (1979) “left an indelible image of Southeast Asia on the world.”1 Drawing upon characters from such films, Lê interlaced Hollywood portrayals of Vietnam with anonymous portraits and documentary images from the war in photo-weavings such as Untitled (Man Carrying Person) (2003), an example from his series “From Vietnam to Hollywood.” He scanned and printed photographs on a large scale, then cut vertical and horizontal strips that he wove together using a simple technique for hand-weaving grass mats the artist learned from an aunt when he was young. Functioning much like memory, the textured weavings reveal certain aspects of the images and obscure others. They overlay “personal memories, media-influenced memories, and Hollywood-fabricated memories to create a surreal landscape memory that is neither fact nor fiction.”2
Dinh Q. Lê wasn’t simply “returning home” when he permanently moved in 1997 to Vietnam, which was slowly emerging from a state of isolation and had changed vastly since his family fled the Khmer Rouge in 1978. Lê, who had lived in the United States from the age of eleven, was educated in American systems, attending art school at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. As the artist described, “I never felt like I was totally Vietnamese or American.”1 In Vietnam, the distinction separated him from the people who had stayed in the country and experienced all the changes firsthand.2 In his film The Imaginary Country (2006), Lê explored ideas of departure and the “sometimes difficult, yet equally courageous act of return,” as curator Rory Padeken described in an essay for the Museum’s 2018 exhibition catalog Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return.3 The title of the exhibition is a rephrasing of a quote the artist pulled from Ursula K. Le Guin’s book The Dispossessed (1974), which for Lê captures the idea that “it’s not about the destination, but rather the journey along the way—the journey when you find yourself.”4
Dinh Q. Lê, in an interview with Melissa Chiu, in Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium (New York: Asia Society, 2005), 20. ↩︎
Nora A. Taylor, “Dinh Q. Lê’s Filmic (Re)Vision of Vietnamese Art History,” in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, ed. Rory Padeken (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2019), 44. ↩︎
Rory Padeken, “An Endless Blue,” in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, ed. Padeken (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2019), 108. ↩︎
Dinh Q. Lê, in conversation with Moira Roth, October 28, 2017–March 9, 2018, in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, ed. Rory Padeken (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2019), 19. ↩︎
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