Dinh Q. Lê’s art confronts viewers not only with the presence and memory of refugees, but also the processes of visualization that render such a category legible. Deftly moving between and combining craft, photography, and video, Lê’s body of work has consistently probed how both American and Vietnamese media picture and narrate Vietnam and Cambodia, especially from the period of his childhood during the 1970s through the 1980s. This era manifested protracted violence: the liberation of Điện Biên Phủ from the grip of the French Colonial Empire led to the Resistance War against America (from another perspective, aka, the Vietnam War) and the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. Notwithstanding the massive societal upheavals engendered through these conflicts, Lê’s work shows how people continue to assert life even in the midst of cataclysmic events. Simultaneously the rupture of civil order fragments institutions that might otherwise provide social stability, from families to governments.
Such processes of fragmentation both break human networks and provide unanticipated connections. These themes dominated Lê’s major solo exhibition entitled Photographing the Thread of Memory shown at the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris from February to November 2022. (Fig. 1) The installation put his large oeuvre into conversation not only with the ongoing influx of refugees into Europe, but also with discourses about refugees across the world. Photographing the Thread of Memory invited various forms of engagement with visitors, and the show overlapped with last year’s special issue of Theatre Journal on Installation (September 2022). To create a kind of dialogue between the concerns of that work and this special issue on Refugee Processing, Lê’s imagery seemed particularly appropriate to serve as our September 2023 cover. His perspective as a refugee whose art continues to frame disparate understandings of that term opens urgent conversations about aesthetics, asylum, care, departures, and memory now and in the past.
Sean Metzger (SM):
I saw your 2022 exhibition Photographing the Thread of Memory, and I was wondering if you could speak specifically about the genesis of that exhibition and how it might speak to the current moment, specifically in terms of conversations about refugees in Europe and elsewhere? (Fig. 2)
Dinh Q. Lê (DL):
I’ve loved that museum for a long time because part of my work is about craft. And so I’ve always visited Quai Branly over the years whenever I’m in Paris. But for a long time, I think, Europe and France were not really interested in my work. They saw my work as part of American history because it deals with the Vietnam War. It’s a particular American history. I think for a long time Europe was not interested because their art is more about conceptual abstractions and formal issues and things like that. When you have something political and focus on war or refugees—it was not in the mindset of many curators in Europe. But then, with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, all that blew up. With all these refugees flooding into Europe, suddenly this issue became very relevant. Over the years there’s more and more exhibitions that focus on the issue. Fifteen years ago, Europe would not be interested at all. The landscape has changed.
Branly always had contemporary art exhibitions either on the ground floor or the new space that they created for contemporary projects. Out of the blue Christine [Barthe], the curator of the show, contacted me (and I was quite surprised that they knew who I am) and asked me to be in a group exhibition a year before the pandemic. So I was in a group exhibition. And then after that group exhibition, Christine came back and said that the museum is interested in doing a solo show with me with the new space that they have. And also they have this man who is funding the museum to do exhibitions like this. That’s how it started.
SM:
I thought it was a great exhibition. So your own background interests me: you were born in Vietnam, near the Cambodian border and your family fled the Khmer Rouge to Thailand. Then you came to LA around 1978, is that right?
DL:
It’s somewhat correct. There’s a little bit more detail. Basically my family could have left in 1975, but my father didn’t want to, and he figured he was a high school principal, so there’s no harm staying. But it turned out that the communist government from the North, when they took over the South, things became extremely restricted. It was quite difficult at that time. And, of course, in, in the late 1970s, there were already skirmishes along the borders between Vietnam and Cambodia. And then it blew up, I think, in 1977; suddenly we became refugees inside Vietnam. We had to evacuate the town that I was in, which is Hà Tîen. It’s a kilometer and a half from the border which is quite close. We moved to a farmhouse, but it was not far enough. Eventually my parents decided that, between a very repressive government at the time and the invasion of the Khmer Rouge, it was time to leave Vietnam. We got on a boat, a fishing boat with about eighty other people, and we escaped Vietnam. We landed in southern Thailand.
SM:
Wow. Detail does help me picture this. When you came to the US, you stayed to go to undergrad and grad school here?
DL:
Yes. We were near Portland, Oregon for a couple of months in a small town. We were sponsored by a church: wonderful people, really wonderful communities. Five hundred people live in this small town, and the whole community, through the church, sponsored us. And we stayed there for, I think, about six months. But it was just so alienating. My mom decided that we needed to move to Southern California, where we have some relatives. That’s when we moved to Simi Valley. You know, Ronald Reagan [Presidential] Library and the Rodney King trial—that’s there. So it was quite a change. It’s a very nice small town. Well, it’s growing now, but it’s also a very conservative town. In terms of being a minority in that little town, there were not that many people of color during that era in the town. So it was quite interesting growing up there; I went to junior high and high school there. And eventually I went to UC Santa Barbara for my undergrad. I started out more in engineering. Of course, as an immigrant, you don’t want to go into the arts, right? Right. So I fought that for a long time. But then my third year, I decided that that was it. I wanted to study art, and so I switched majors into studio art and finished my undergraduate. And then I took a gap year and then, I think, in 1991 I moved to New York to get my Master’s at School of Visual Arts in New York.
SM:
I noticed your work heavily emphasizes Cambodia and Vietnam. Has it always been like that? Has that always been the focus?
DL:
Yeah, pretty much. I’ve always wanted to understand . . . you know, I was born into the middle of the war. All these forces and events pushed this boy from a small town all the way across the world, you know? And I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand the reasons why America was in Vietnam, didn’t understand why the Khmer Rouge was invading my hometown. So I think all these questions have always been with me. When I started college, there were more classes about the Vietnam War. But even then it was so limited because this was in the early 90s. At that time it was all over Hollywood, but the courses were not in school, right? And so I didn’t know much about it except through research personally. Then there was a course by a professor named Walter Capps. It was one of the most popular and one of the earliest classes on the Vietnam War that was offered in an American university [Capp’s “Religion and the Impact of Vietnam” was first offered in 1979]. The class was extremely popular. It was always full. And I am told that the class was featured two or three times on 60 Minutes.
SM:
Oh!
DL:
Yeah. That’s how popular it was because, you know, every week the professor would invite Vietnam veterans, Americans, to come and kind of give testimony about their experiences in Vietnam. It was an extremely emotional class. Basically the whole class would be crying because I think many of the students in that class had parents, had fathers, that were in Vietnam. And I think this is the first time that they understood their fathers a little bit, what their fathers went through. But I was frustrated because throughout the ten-week course, there were no Vietnamese invited to speak. And I was like, “But I thought, this is about the Vietnam War. So there must be, you know, Vietnamese must be involved somehow.” And so I went to talk to the professor. I’m like where are the Vietnamese and where are their stories? And he was a little bit embarrassed. And he basically said that that he couldn’t find any who were willing to talk: which is kind of problematic because there’s a very large Vietnamese American community in Southern California and Northern California. Anyway, I think he did eventually invite Vietnamese after I left school, and eventually Vietnamese were invited to speak.
But, after that experience, I realized that our story is not being told. No Hollywood representation—we were the shadow in the jungle or we were the prostitutes or we were the pretty girl who didn’t say anything. I realized that all of this discussion, all of this class and these movies are about Americans’ experience in Vietnam. It’s not about the Vietnam War, you know? That was when I started obsessively researching and trying to find stories and narratives on the Vietnamese perspective of the war. And that led to coming back to Vietnam to do research. I started spending more time in Vietnam; I also went to my hometown. Once there, the war between Vietnam and Cambodia also came into play. All these memories came back. I needed to understand why Cambodia and Vietnam were at war. And so that research also veered into that direction. The next thing I know it is like more than twenty years later, I’m still working on both issues. Wow.
SM:
And when did you decide to relocate to Vietnam permanently?
DL:
I finished graduate school in 1993, and I got this Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Unfortunately, the grant, this type of grant, is no longer available. So ‘93 was the first time through this grant from the NEA that I traveled to Vietnam to do research on Vietnam War photography: the photographs from the Vietnamese photographer because most of the what you saw in the New York Times or during the war were primarily by foreign photographers sent to Vietnam. So I wanted to see the other side. And so I realized that the stories I heard, the narratives I heard, everything I heard, it’s not in America. So I started coming back often—every three months I would be in Vietnam and for three months I would be in America trying to work and save up money to come back. By 1997, I decided that that’s it. I wanted to move back to Vietnam full time and just focus on making work.
SM:
Let’s talk about your art in terms of the medium. You have said that American film and photography from the 1960s through the 1980s had a significant impact on your work. I think you’ve just been talking about that, and I’m quite taken by the citation of films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Eddie Adams’ execution photo [“Saigon Execution,” 1968] in your work. Can you elaborate how, and then also speak a little bit more about why, you incorporate these influences into your work?
DL:
As I mentioned before, Hollywood took over the Vietnam War, which is after the war in the 1980s. But before that you had images by Eddie Adams and [Larry] Burrows, all these very famous photojournalists. Millions of people, not only in America, but billions of people all over the world see Vietnam through these very iconic images. For a long time that was Vietnam. You know, images of a girl running naked down the street: that was what people thought when they thought of Vietnam. They thought of these images. And then in the 80s through the 90s, Hollywood started coming out with all these movies about the Vietnam War. That’s how the world saw Vietnam through this Hollywood representation of Vietnam. And that’s how they saw me. You know, they saw me through the war photograph and Hollywood. But of course, I also went through the Vietnam War, part of it. And my experience was different. Somehow I always felt like there was war, but also you go on with your lives as best as you can. It’s not always war; it’s more complex than that. So I wanted to look at that. There’s a lot left out. And that’s not wholly my experience. That’s not wholly who I am.
The memory of the Vietnam War is now a complex mixture: first the war photographs and then the Hollywood representations, which dominate the memories of Vietnam. So I want to break them down and start to insert other narratives that I feel have completely been left out. I was curious, asking about myself as well: where are my memories of the Vietnam War? Is it from the war photojournalist? The photo that was taken then, or the Hollywood representation, which is fictional? The personal memory? They all kind of jumble up in a way because it’s a combination between facts and fiction. Everything’s kind of merging, so I was trying to break the whole thing apart into pieces or to deconstruct it, to start to talk about how everything is merging between facts, between fiction, between personal memories into this landscape of surreal memories, neither facts nor fiction. That’s how the series from Vietnam to Hollywood started.
SM:
One of the things I love about the work is that it forces the viewer to fragment any [given] narrative, so it can’t be seamless. Can you talk about Untitled (Milano 002) [which adorns the front cover of the September 2023 Theatre Journal issue]?
DL:
I really wanted to bring the power of writing and rewriting history that Hollywood has that we don’t really think about. I think a lot of us think Hollywood is just entertainment. I was raised in America, and there is this saying that the winner gets to write the history. But I always thought, wait! Didn’t America lose the war? So how did they get to write the history? If you’re rich and you’re powerful and you have the platforms through Hollywood to speak to the world, you get to write the history. Yeah, so it’s not about winning. It’s about who has the power, so I wanted to bring the powerful studios from Hollywood into play about how our understanding of certain events is very much being dictated by Hollywood and these very powerful companies.
SM:
And the black and white image of the couple getting married or the woman—did you pull them from someplace specific or. . .?
DL:
Yeah, I have been collecting vernacular Vietnamese photography for years. And actually there’s been a researcher here the last couple of weeks going through them. I didn’t realize. . . over a hundred thousand photographs. Wow! I was always kind of fascinated by them because they are images of everyday life images of people. And the thing about the vernacular photography that is interesting is that we pretty much choose the moment we want to remember. It’s not like today: you have, you know, the iPhone where you can take pictures any time you want. Back then, you hire a photographer or something like that. And so these are moments that are captured that are basically moments people want to remember. They make an effort to have it photographed. And so it’s a wonderful show of Vietnam living: life even though there’s a war in the back. People still have hope. They got married. They go out; they have fun. And it was like, you don’t see the war in the photograph in some way. That’s really kind of amazing. Compare those photographs to the images of the war that everybody saw during the Vietnam War in the newspaper. It’s completely contradictory in a way. The war never saw this photograph, this vernacular photograph of Vietnamese during the war who are actually happy, that actually try to enjoy life as much as they can.
That was such a contradiction to the images that the rest of the world saw of Vietnam. I wanted to start to insert these other narratives that have completely been left out because they don’t fit into the narrative of the war. Of course, the New York Timesis not going to print a picture of a happy couple getting married. It’s not going to sell the newspaper, and the photojournalist is not going to win the Pulitzer Prize for this kind of photo. So they only seek out the most horrific image that they can. And that’s why, I’m starting to insert my weaving into this other narrative, this kind of moment that you just don’t see in many ways, don’t expect because you’re so used to thinking that the country is in a war; therefore there shouldn’t be any happiness or people going on with their lives.
SM:
One of the things I was interested in you’ve mentioned a few times: the craft in the work in terms of the weaving, but the exhibition also included drawing and sketching. So it really emphasizes the labor of art as well.
DL:
There’s something about drawing; the drawings in the show aren’t mine. They are by artists that were soldiers during the war. But I’ve always just felt craft allows a kind of process, this process of allowing: a kind of intimacy. If you remember [in the videos], they talk about how sitting, drawing with somebody creates this connection. Drawing a portrait of someone and looking at them—this connection transfers between them and the sitter. That quality was always kind of interesting. And the same thing with the weaving; it is this, this slow process. For me, it’s a bit like meditation. I’m in my studio and I’m looking at these photographs and I’m starting to kind of go into this space where I could lose time. It’s quite labor intensive. Sometimes the next thing I know it’s like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and I’ve just realized how late it is.
Also contemporary art painting in particular didn’t come into Vietnam until the late 20s. Before that we had basically craft. We didn’t have artists. We had craftspeople. And even today, craft still holds a very dominant place in Vietnamese culture. I grew up with an aunt who knew how to do grass mat weavings. And she taught me when I was young how to do it. So, you know, crafts always have been around, and it’s much more connected . . . more than, let’s say, oil painting or other forms. That’s why it plays a very prominent role in my practice.
SM:
Can you talk a little bit about how you moved to sculptural weaving in terms of the spheres and the Adrift in Darkness series with the rattan structure?
DL:
I studied photography. So I’m always in this kind of two dimensional flat frame of mind. When I start weaving, it becomes three dimensional in a way. It’s layers, you know, many layers. And also one of the interesting things about the weaving is that when you look at the weaving, even though it’s flat, you have to move. You move up and down. You move sideways, and certain things reveal themselves. So when you look at a flat weaving of mine, you have to behave like you’re looking at a sculpture, You have to move around. You can’t stand in one place and look at it like, like you would an image. So I’ve always wanted to take it into three dimensional realms, the weavings, but never had a good reason to do it besides the fact that it’s three dimensional.
When I was working on Adrift in Darkness, I was thinking about my personal experience as a boat refugee person and thinking about drifting in the ocean in the middle of the night. And the ocean, even during the day, is so vast you don’t see anything around you. And you’re in this little boat. I was trying to relate that experience, my experience to what’s happening in Southern Europe, where there’s probably millions of refugees by now from Africa. They’re all trying to enter by boat. Europeans protest against the refugees, against allowing them to come in. So I was thinking about that. I was thinking of basically sitting on a rock, a big rock and floating, the earth floating through space. There’s so, so, so much anger and everything that’s kind of boiling up inside us. And we’re just floating through. And [I was thinking about] my own personal experience of floating in this vast ocean, and now these people are going through the same thing that I did. There’s so much conflict happening, yet we’re kind of drifting in this dark space. That was really the inspiration for me to create a kind of asteroid that’s floating through this space, this dark space. And I just feel that there’s no answer. We still don’t have an answer for what’s happening right now. Looking back at my experience, which is about forty some years ago, we still haven’t figured it out.
SM:
I thought Adrift in Darkness was especially fascinating because it’s an organic material underneath something mediated, which is sort of what you’re expressing in your work in terms of how people perceive themselves versus how refugee images mediate and inform how you’re understood. It generates a sense of an alien environment. Alien is of course, the word we use to talk about a lot of migrants. I just thought it was really productive. I wondered about your work with video and how that emerged. Even though it was a violent image, it was quite meditative for me to watch over and over: the video with the helicopter crashing into the sea.
DL:
I was doing another project called The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006), which is basically about this self-taught mechanic, who’s also a farmer. He started with a friend to make a helicopter from scratch. (Fig. 3) As a child, he was living in Tây Ninh, which is also another border town with Cambodia. And this large American base is there. And as a little kid during the war, he would watch helicopters taking off for a reconnaissance trip or attacking some VC hiding in the area. And he fell in love with the helicopter as a kid. Now he’s an adult; he has the means. He started to build this helicopter. During the research for that film, we ran into images of the last day of the Vietnam War. America brought something like 5000 helicopters to Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It’s called the first helicopter war. It was the first time that the helicopter was not only used for moving troops and evacuation of the wounded, but also the first time that the helicopter was armed. That was the first time that the helicopter became a weapon in a way. America thought, with the helicopter, they would have a kind of technological advantage to win the war because the roads in the jungle in Vietnam were inaccessible. But, of course, it didn’t work out that way. And so I was fascinated when watching images of the last day of the Vietnam War, where hundreds of helicopters flew out of southern Vietnam to Saigon, particularly over the Pacific Ocean trying to reach the US aircraft carrier to escape from the invading communist force from the north. But the aircraft carrier, at some point, there was no more room. So they started to push helicopters off the carrier and at some point the pilots were so desperate that they just kind of flew the helicopters into the ocean and jumped out before they crashed into the water and swam to the rescue boat nearby. It was quite an amazing image of failure.
I wanted to make this work with the farmers that I interviewed, a bunch of people who remember the helicopter, their impressions of the helicopter during the war. They describe it as an animal. They weren’t thinking of it as a machine. And that was really kind of interesting for me. I wanted to make this somewhat abstract work. It’s just like all these helicopters flying, and some force or event may just cause them to fall down into the ocean. That was the idea. If you look at it, it feels like an animal that’s kind of flying and some sort of a virus or some sort of pandemic or something [forces them to] . . . just drop from the sky into the ocean. Then, eventually the water just kind of takes over and goes back to normal. It’s a poetic kind of representation of violence because I think for us, we bring some of our knowledge about people in there.
But what is really kind of fascinating is when I have shown that work over the years, children today see it completely differently. It’s a video game. When I was showing it in Japan, the curator told me that, you know, children would sit for hours counting the helicopters falling. Really? Wow. And, you know, their parents would be, like, horrified because they have memories of the Vietnam War or at least, their grandparents [do]. I guess once the context is out of it, it becomes something else.
SM:
That’s so interesting. Everything you’ve done in the exhibition speaks so well to the issue on refugee processing. I just wanted to give you a chance to add or say things I hadn’t asked you about that you wanted to talk about.
DL:
Oh, let’s see. I think the world somehow got this notion that everybody from the developing world wants to move to the first world. You know, they think that we want to go there for economic reasons, primarily. I never wanted to go to America. I was just kind of swept up. There’s millions of other people who never want to leave their home country, but through forces beyond their control, they had to. I’m the perfect example. As soon as Vietnam stabilized again, I moved back. Not all of us want to be in America or be in Europe; it’s not the reality for many of us.
SM:
Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.