Dinh Q. LêVietnam to Hollywood

A photo-weaved collage of two contrasting images in a style that resembles vietnamese matts
Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled (Man Carrying Person), 2003. Chromogenic print and linen tape, 38 x 72 inches. San José Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds from the Lipman Acquisitions Fund, 2018.03. Courtesy of Dinh Q. Lê and P.P.O.W., New York.

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

  1. Dinh Q. Lê, in conversation with Moira Roth, in Dinh Q. Lê: From Vietnam to Hollywood (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2003), 20. ↩︎

  2. Dinh Q. Lê, in conversation with Moira Roth, in Dinh Q. Lê: From Vietnam to Hollywood (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2003), 20. ↩︎