Dinh Q. Lê

Dinh Q. Lê (born 1968; Vietnamese name: Lê Quang Đỉnh) is a Vietnamese American multimedia artist, best known for his photography work and photo-weaving technique. Many of his works consider the Vietnam War as well as methods of memory and how it connects to the present.[1] Other series of his, such as his From Hollywood to Vietnam, explore the relation of pop culture to personal memory and the difference between history and its portrayals in media. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal described him as "one of the world's most visible Vietnamese contemporary artists".[2]

Dinh Q. Lê
Born1968
NationalityAmerican
Occupationmultimedia artist
Years active1990s - present
Notable work"Mot Coi Di Ve" (1999), "The Farmers and the Helicopters" (2010)

Life and education

Lê was born in 1968[3] in Hà Tiên, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodia border. The Cambodian-Vietnamese War of the 1970s brought Khmer Rouge troops to the region. When he was ten, in 1978, his family escaped. When the journey began, Lê was accompanied by his six siblings and his mother. However, while the ten year-old Lê made it safely onto the boat along with his mother, his other siblings did not. In an interview published in a catalogue for one of his exhibitions, he recalled the story of the escape. It was a "desperate run for freedom," and he said that he "[would] never forget the look on his mother's face as she scoured the beach...for signs of her eldest sons and daughter".[1] After a year-long stay in Thailand, the family eventually moved across the ocean and settled in Los Angeles.[3][4]

After Lê received BFA degree in photography from University of California, Santa Barbara, he began his own career as an artist. He began to weave photos, inspired by the grass-mat weaving lessons he had from his aunt when he was a child. He earned his MFA degree from The School of Visual Arts in New York.[5] By 2005, he was living primarily in Ho Chi Minh City,[5] though he did not exhibit there due to the requirement to apply for a government permit.[4]

Lê is also a collector of Vietnamese art and antiques.[2]

Art career
Untitled (1) (1998) at the Washington Convention Center in 2022

Much of Lê's work explores "the narrative of loss" and the traumas of war.[6]

In his early work, by weaving strips of photos together using a planting procedure, Lê created large-scale photographic montages. He stated that it was inspired by his aunt's technique of weaving mats out of grass.[4] In this technique, images are layered in a repetition of patterning with glossy tapestries made entirely out of type C prints. Linen tape is used to finish the edges. Reviewing a show of these works in 1998, "The Headless Buddha," Claudine Ise of Los Angeles Times described it as "mind-blowing" and "amazingly intricate".[7]

The helicopter from the video installation The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006)

In 1999, Lê had his first major success with "Mot Coi Di Ve," a work in which he interwove thousands of photographs into a quilt. He took the title of the work from a popular Vietnamese song, "Spending One's Life Trying to Return Home".[4] By 2014, the New York Times was reporting that Lê's collages were selling for $50,000 to $60,000 apiece.[8]

In 2005, a small exhibition of Lê's photographic collages was shown by the Asia Society. Art critic Ken Johnson of the New York Times gave the exhibition a mixed review, stating that some works had "an affecting emotional urgency," but also criticizing what he saw as Lê's "susceptibility to overly literal or obvious ideas."[5]

In 2007, Lê co-founded the non-profit art space Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City) along with Tiffany Chung and Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Phunam Thuc Ha of The Propeller Group.[9] In 2018, he curated Guerilla Tactics, a solo show of contemporary ceramics by the artist Nguyen Quoc Chanh at MoT+++ in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.[10]

Video installations

The New York Museum of Modern Art exhibited Lê's video exhibition "The Farmers and the Helicopters" in 2010, a three-channel video of Vietnam War scenes and interviews with Vietnamese people. It also included a working helicopter built from scratch by Lê and a friend.[11][12] Holland Cotter of The New York Times noted that it appeared to be the museum's most popular exhibit when he visited, and described it as "a visually tight and ideologically porous weave of fact and fiction, memory and illusion, with the elements of each pair in constant, volatile interchange."[11] The installation was acquired for MoMA's permanent collection.[11]

Another of Lê's video exhibitions, "Light and Belief" (2012), juxtaposed watercolors by Vietnamese artists during the Vietnam War with interviews that Lê conducted with them. "Light and Belief" was exhibited at Documenta (a quinquennial exhibition in Kassel, Germany) in 2012[13] and again at the Asia Society in 2017.[14]

In 2015, his video installations were the subject of a retrospective at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.[3] It was his first large-scale museum show in Asia,[12] and the first time the museum had given a large solo show to an artist from Southeast Asia.[15]

Awards

References
  1. "Dinh Q. Lê Erasure". Issuu. Retrieved 2020-12-04.
  2. Seno, Alexandra A. (August 21, 2009). "The Collector: Dinh Q. Le". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  3. "ArtAsiaPacific: Dinh Q Le". artasiapacific.com. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  4. Napack, Jonathan (June 5, 2005). "Vietnam's artists try to break free of their 'Velvet Prison'". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  5. Johnson, Ken (October 7, 2005). "Images of Vietnamese in the Generation Since the War". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  6. Lam, Andrew. "Living in the Tenses in Saigon." World Literature Today, vol. 93, no. 3, 2019, pp. 48–51. JSTOR. Accessed 16 Aug. 2023.
  7. Ise, Claudine (March 6, 1998). "'Headless Buddha' Weaves History, Myth". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  8. Reyburn, Scott (May 15, 2014). "East Meets West at Hong Kong Art Fair, but Who Is Buying?". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  9. "The Propeller Group". Guggenheim. Archived from the original on 21 February 2015. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
  10. "Guerilla tactics". Oi. 2018-02-12. Retrieved 2019-09-30.
  11. Cotter, Holland (August 13, 2010). "Vietnamese Voices Against a Whir of War". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  12. Qin, Amy (October 1, 2015). "The Artist Dinh Q. Le Expands His Gaze to Worlds Beyond Vietnam". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  13. Taylor, Nora A. "Re-authoring images of the Vietnam War." South East Asia Research vol. 25, no. 1 (March 2017). JSTOR.
  14. Farago, Jason (September 27, 2017). "Southeast Asia Stakes Its Claim in the Art World". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  15. Shea, Christopher D. (July 17, 2015). "Artsbeat". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  16. "Prince Claus Awards" (PDF). Prince Claus Fund. 2010. Retrieved August 5, 2023.
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