PROFILES
Dinh Q. Lê
Excavating History
by Denise Tsui

On the warm March afternoon I met Dinh Q. Lê, he was completing the installation of his solo show at Hong Kong's 10 Chancery Lane, scheduled to open two days later. He had plastered the gallery walls with alluring backdrops of Vietnam's balmy Da Nang beach, while along the rear wall potted and brightly painted coconuts sprouting young palms sat haphazardly on the ground. At that moment, Lê was attending to a glass-fronted refrigeration case, inside of which stood a white polymer sculpture of Vietnam's Communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) wearing a lei around his neck. The exhibition, titled "Tropicana Migration," marked the first time Lê had deliberately used irony in a body of work, although he confided that the ideas were nearly ten years in the making. As we sat down amid this exotic assemblage, with Ho Chi Minh staring at us, Lê mused, "Maybe I am getting older and I cannot be so serious. Sometimes humor gets you further."

Born in Hà Tiên, Vietnam, near the Cambodian border, Lê was ten when, in 1978, he and his family were forced to flee an invasion of Khmer Rouge fighters. "When I was a kid I never thought I would need to leave Vietnam . . . but here I am, my whole life completely changed because of the war," Lê recalled. Despite spending his formative years in Los Angeles, he always felt residing in America was temporary. "As soon as I knew the country opened up, I couldn't move back fast enough," he said with a laugh. Eager to search for the missing fragments of his uprooted history, Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time in 1993, before permanently resettling three years later in Ho Chi Minh City, or as he still refers to it, Saigon.

It was there in Vietnam and Cambodia that Lê found his artistic impetus. "The people who went through the war—their experiences and their stories—are here, not in America," he explained. Lê's multidisciplinary practice unearths difficult episodes of Southeast Asia's past, challenging received histories of war and conflict and their devastating aftermaths. A trip to Cambodia inspired works such as Texture of Memory (2000–01), embroidered images of prisoners at the notorious Phnom Penh prison Tuol Sleng, stitched with white thread on white canvas; and "Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness" (1998–2000), a series of untitled "woven" photographs, created by slicing two clashing images—often photojournalistic images and Hollywood film depictions of the war—into strips, which the artist then interlaces to form a composite image that bears little resemblance to the initial photographs. Lê developed the technique using the grass-mat weaving skill he had learned as a young boy from his aunt, adapting it to photography as a way to poke at the skewed renderings of history encountered in his American upbringing. Later broadening his art from still to moving images, Lê created the three-channel video The Farmers & the Helicopters (2006), juxtaposing footage of Vietnamese locals sharing their memories of wartime helicopters with clips of the aircraft from Hollywood blockbusters. The work, which is included in Lê's retrospective exhibition at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum that opened in July, was another turning point for Lê, who began to feel, as he said "inadequate to describe [his countrymen's] experiences," which led him to believe that giving those who endured the war a chance to speak for themselves was "much more powerful."

A notable departure from previous projects, "Tropicana Migration" was full of cheerful appearances'at least superficially. The exhibition satirically explored Vietnam's rapidly expanding tourism industry. "I don't think it's a great thing," lamented Lê, as he shared stories of Da Nang's wartime history as a United States military air base. For Lê, the expansion of the area into a luxurious resort destination has become a sad incidence of history repeating itself as tourist numbers increase—a foreign invasion of a different sort. Representing the tourists, "the coconut," Lê commented, "is an interesting plant. It travels and it's self-contained." He noted that, in the same way vacationers journey from resort to resort soaking up sun and cocktails, the coconut plant "travels from one tropical paradise to another, putting down roots."

It has been a busy year for Lê, who had just arrived from Myanmar after having orchestrated an event at Yangon's Goethe Institut, for which he invited 12 well-known local activists to discuss their perspectives on present-day Myanmar. Lê launched into a lengthy conversation about Yangon's turbulent history, telling me the project "was for the Burmese." Inside the refurbished Goethe Institut—the building was the former residence of General Aung San (1915–1947)—Lê had organized a dinner party for political dissidents (all of the guests had been imprisoned by the country's military junta at one point in their lives) and served favorite dishes of the widely admired general, who led Burma to independence from British rule in 1947 before his assassination that year. Their conversation was conducted in Burmese and filmed; it will later be translated and subtitled. By design, leftovers from the dinner remained untouched and on public view for two weeks at the Goethe Institut as a memory of that evening's discussions.

Following his short stay in Hong Kong, Lê was headed to a cluster of islands off the coast of Peru to film a forthcoming project, to be shown next year at United Kingdom's Ikon Gallery. "It's a big project," he said, adding that it's another idea that he has been concocting for some time. The three-part film installation explores the barbaric history of guano, a potent fertilizer made from bird or bat excrement, from the angle of three chapters in the islands' history: the exploitation of indentured Chinese laborers to harvest the nitrogen-rich substance during the 19th century; the enforcement of the US Guano Islands Act of 1856, which allowed American citizens to seize ownership of unclaimed guano-rich islands; and the Guano War (1864–66) between Spain, Peru and Chile. Lê goes into enthralling detail about each episode in the battle for golden bird poop. With his penchant for research, Lê infuses his works with ingenious narrative threads. The guano project is also uncharted territory for Lê to engage with histories not directly connected to the war in Vietnam or other conflicts in Southeast Asia.

Continuting his intriguing history lesson—coincidentally 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam—Lê brought up an idea he has kept on his mental list of unrealized projects. The highly ambitious scheme would involve a visit to, in Lê's words, "an underwater graveyard of helicopters" in north Saigon—where the vehicles were dumped by the US military during its mass evacuation from Vietnam at the end of the war in 1975. Lê's objective is to salvage one of these helicopters and film the entire process. Grand in both scale and cost, this project does not yet have a backer, but Lê remains optimistic. "It will happen one day. It's just going to have to wait a little longer," Lê said with confidence. With a bright smile, he mused, "Just imagine how incredible it would be . . . hauntingly gorgeous and full of history—a very sad history."