Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey is Return

About the Artist: Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, Vietnam, Dinh Q. Lê and his family escaped the Khmer Rouge invasion of his hometown and fled to the United States in 1979.

He rose to prominence in the early 1990s with a series of unique photo-weavings—interlaced strips of documentary photographs and stills from Hollywood war films in which fantasy and reality, personal and political, past and present, and Vietnamese and American overlap.

Since moving back to Vietnam in 1997, he has used video and found photography to engage other Vietnamese perspectives, giving voice literally and metaphorically to those who have been marginalized by history.   

In 2018, the San José Museum of Art organized Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, the first exhibition to highlight Lê's video and photography installations. Themes of departure and return, the role of the artist during times of war, symbols of American imperialism, and recent histories of Vietnam were explored in the exhibition.

The Imaginary Country features a multichannel video projection of clam-diggers walking out to sea at low tide—a scene Lê originally stumbled upon shortly after he moved back to Vietnam in 1997. Recalling his own traumatic experience of leaving the country by walking to a boat at sea, Lê connected a significant event from his past with a chance encounter in the present.

For his first video work, Dinh Q. Lê explored the idea of departure, an important moment in the diaspora experience when one leaves, sometimes abruptly and sometimes by force, to venture into the unknown. Remarkably, he also considered the sometimes difficult yet equally courageous act of return.  

He further linked these moments to his own recollections of Vietnam and from eleven diasporic Vietnamese from the United States, Canada, and France. For some, it was a melancholic homecoming, while for others, it was a surreal journey to a place known only through the memories of others. Projecting these interconnected narratives across from his watery imagery, Lê opens up a haunting, dreamlike space to reflect on cycles of exile, loss, and the eternal promise of home.

The Farmers and The Helicopters considers the specter of the Vietnam War and its effect on the cultural imagination. This multichannel video installation combines Hollywood films and Western documentaries of the Vietnam War, interspersed with interviews Lê conducted with residents in Trần's village. Those interviewed recall the horrors of the war machine and the fear it instilled in them. For the helicopter-makers, however, the helicopter is a sign of progress that can help reshape the lives of the Vietnamese people.

Bringing together 101 drawings and paintings and a documentary video with animation, Light and Belief: Voices and Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War uncovers an obscure history of the war when Northern Vietnamese artists responded passionately to Hồ Chi Minh’s call to “fight on the battlefield of cultural ideology.” Recognizing their role as visual archivists of the war, Dinh Q. Lê interviewed eleven senior artists, who recounted their experiences with honesty and deep introspection.

Quick sketches of the conflict, leisure activities rendered in fine pen-ink drawings, subtle watercolor landscape paintings, and endearing portraits of fellow patriots encompass the broad range of images produced by these artist-soldiers.

Conceived by Dinh Q. Lê as a counter-narrative to Light and Belief, in which artists banded together in support of a collective ideal, Vision in Darkness: Trần Trung Tín celebrates individual artistic expression and the vital role artists play in revealing society’s historical, ideological, and moral transgressions.

Lê tells the story of Trần Trung Tín (1933–2008), a self-taught artist who embraced the communist ideology as a teenager, and moved from Saigon to Hanoi in 1954. Holding the position of Party Secretary, Trần eventually became disillusioned with the party’s repressive social policies. His only salvation was to create abstract artworks, in a form of resistance that went against the established artistic and social norms of the time.

When Dinh Q. Lê returned to Vietnam in 1997, he longed to find his family photographs that were abandoned in haste when he fled the country twenty years earlier. Instead, he found thousands of other family photographs that somehow managed to escape the Vietnamese government’s continuous effort to erase the history of South Vietnam. In Crossing the Farther Shore, Lê rescued an important visual record of Vietnam’s past from political purging and historical amnesia.

Stitching together unknown and private identities with personal, cultural, and historical narratives, Lê created what he calls “a sleeping, dreaming memory of Vietnam.” With these ethereal canopies, he offers a new image of the country no longer stricken by conflict and war, but filled with love, possibility, and hope.

In rarely seen photo-weavings from the series Tapestry, Dinh Q. Lê used floral iconography to address the effects of trauma and war on the cultural imagination. Pushing the limits of representation, Lê’s woven photographs are at once personal and universal, melancholic and joyful, and reverential and energetic.

Beautiful yet elegiac, these floral abstractions memorialize Vietnamese lives lost to war and violence, while also symbolizing a bountiful and prosperous future for the country.