Working in photography, film, and installation, Dinh Q. Lê presents little-known narratives of war and migration from the perspective of Vietnam, America, and the global Vietnamese diaspora. Synthesizing his own memory and perception with popular depictions in entertainment and journalism from Western and Eastern cultures, Lê’s singular voice has reframed global histories of Southern Vietnam, challenging censorship, exploitation, and propaganda from all sides.
Dinh Q. Lê (1968-2024) uses photography as both a technology for image making and an apparatus for distributing ideological narratives, Lê, in recent works, expand the category of photography to reveal the failings of individual memory and collective perceptions. Lê’s evocative photographic artworks combine interior and exterior pictures of Cambodian sites and pair the seemingly unresolvable, competing narratives of a country’s past and present. Interlaced vertical and horizontal strips of documentary photographs juxtapose grandiose ancient Angkor temples with sparse interior rooms of the Tuol Sleng Museum and other memorial locations marred by the violence inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). Warm, golden-hued pictorial tapestries belie the painful legacy of the empty torture rooms.
The weaving process of the artist’s photographic constructions physically intertwine narratives to reiterate the dichotomous nature of cultural memory. Dinh Q. Lê was born in 1968 in Ha Tien, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodia border. Soon after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978, the Lê family immigrated to the United States. After receiving a BFA from UC Santa Barbara, Lê began his first photo-weavings using a traditional technique he learned from his aunt. Lê participated in the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the 2009 Biennale Cuveê in Linz, Austria; the 2008 Singapore Biennale; and the 2006 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, in Brisbane, Australia.
His work has been exhibited at major institutions and international exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Tufts University Art Gallery, Boston, MA; and the Asia Society, New York, NY, among many others. In 2010, he was awarded the Prince Claus Award for his outstanding contribution to cultural exchange. Lê co-founded Sàn Art, an independent exhibition space with curatorial and artist residency programs in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.