Dinh Q. Lê

Biography

In 2010–2011 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Dinh Q. Lê’s three-channel video “The Farmers and the Helicopters”. In the gallery stood a real helicopter, built from scratch by a Vietnamese farmer, Le Van Danh, and a self-taught mechanic, Tran Quoc Hai. Lê made the work together with Phunam Thuc Ha and Tuan Andrew Nguyen of The Propeller Group. The museum later acquired it for its permanent collection.

He was born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, a small town near the Cambodian border. In the 1970s Khmer Rouge troops appeared in the area. In 1978, when he was ten, his family escaped (by other accounts, in 1979). He was accompanied by his mother and six siblings, but only he and his mother made it onto the boat; some of his brothers and sisters did not get aboard in time. Many years later, in an interview for an exhibition catalogue, he said he would never forget the look on his mother’s face as she searched the beach for her older children. After a year in Thailand the family moved to Los Angeles.

He received a BFA in photography from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He began weaving photographs early in his career. The method came from childhood lessons with his aunt, who taught him to make mats from grass: strips of photographs, vertical and horizontal, are interlaced like fibres. His materials included documentary images and stills from Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, which in Vietnam is called the American War. The edges of the works are finished with linen tape, and the prints are type C photographic prints. Lê himself said that these works were an attempt to find his place in America, in the West.

His first notable success came in 1999 with “Mot Coi Di Ve”, into which thousands of photographs are woven. The title comes from a Vietnamese song about spending one’s life trying to return home. The series “From Hollywood to Vietnam” deals with how pop culture shapes personal memory and how history differs from its portrayals on screen. In 1998 a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times described the exhibition “The Headless Buddha” as remarkably intricate in execution. In 2005 the Asia Society in New York showed a small exhibition of his photographic collages; a critic for the New York Times gave it a mixed review, finding an affecting emotional urgency in some works and, in others, an excessive literalness.

By the mid-2000s he lived mainly in Ho Chi Minh City, where he had been a regular visitor since the 1990s. Showing work there was hampered by the need to apply for a government permit. In his first weeks back he felt like an outsider, a Vietnamese émigré who was “too Americanized”, and he described this path as re-learning how to be Vietnamese. He collected Vietnamese art and antiques; in his words, collecting was a way of reclaiming his heritage.

One of his early public projects was “Damaged Gene” (1998). At the time the consequences of Agent Orange were little discussed. Lê arranged with the owner of a kiosk in the Central Market in Ho Chi Minh City to use her stall for a month and set up an exhibition there: toys and clothes made for conjoined twins, dolls with deformed bodies, pacifiers with two teats. Conversations with passers-by took the place of an artist’s statement. The work was later shown in exhibitions abroad. In 2007 he co-founded the non-profit space Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City with Tiffany Chung, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Phunam Thuc Ha. In 2012, for dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, he showed “Light and Belief”: about a hundred watercolours by Vietnamese soldiers who had been sent to the front lines as war artists, alongside his interviews with them. It was a step towards curatorial work. “The Colony” (2016), a five-channel installation about islands off the coast of Peru that the United States claimed under the Guano Act of 1856, was his first video installation not directly tied to Vietnam. Lê compared its subject to what China is doing in the South China Sea.

Among his other works are “From Father to Son” (2009), which sets the roles of Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen in “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon” side by side, and “The Scrolls” (2013), with digitally distorted famous photographs of the war, each fifty metres long. “Crossing the Farther Shore” consists of seven weightless-looking structures resembling the mosquito nets under which refugees slept in camps. The retrospective “Memory for Tomorrow” was held at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2015 and was his first large museum show in Asia. “The Colony” was shown in Rotterdam at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2017), and “True Journey Is Return” at the San Jose Museum of Art (2018–2019). In 2022 the musée du quai Branly in Paris devoted an exhibition to him.

He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994), the Dupont Foundation (1994) and the Aaron Siskind Foundation (1992), the Prince Claus Award (2010) and a Bellagio fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2014). In 2024, for the Ichihara Lakeside Museum in Japan, he made the quilt installation “The Ties That Bind”, created together with local residents and Vietnamese participants.

He died in Ho Chi Minh City on 6 April 2024.