Dinh Q. Lê. Lost and Found

Clip of Dinh Q. Lê installing Crossing the Farther Shore (2014) at Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, 2014. Video by Walley Films and commissioned by Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas.

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


  1. 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. ↩︎

  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. ↩︎