FEATURES
Weaving History
An interview with Dinh Q. Lê
BY DAVID SPALDING 

Dinh Q. Lê was born in 1968 near the Cambodian border in Ha-Tien, Vietnam, during the Vietnam-American War. In 1979, as fighting erupted between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, Lê and his family fled their homeland, eventually relocating to the Los Angeles area. This uprooting would have a profound effect on the artist. As he struggled to rectify the textbook depictions of recent Southeast Asian history with his own memories and experiences, Lê became acutely aware of the power wielded by those who decide the fate of the past. In the early 90s, while still a graduate student at New York's School of Visual Arts, Lê earned critical acclaim for his dazzling photo-weavings. Using patterns he had learned as a boy by watching his aunt weave grass mats, the artist began fusing images from Italian Renaissance paintings with photographic self-portraits. These early works evoke the complexity of cultural crossover, capturing a hybrid identity caught between two worlds. Around the same time, the artist made his first trip back to Vietnam and Cambodia, searching for the missing pieces of his history. The journey marked the beginning of a personal and artistic transformation.

After spending several years dividing his time between the US and Vietnam, Lê now lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. Much of his artwork, which ranges from photo-weavings, installations and embroidered images to sculpture, video and site-specific interventions, is linked by an ongoing impulse to excavate the buried pieces of Southeast Asia's past. Consistently challenging received histories, Lê exposes our blind spots and expands our collective field of vision. In doing so, he offers new ways for us to envision the future.

Last year, I met with Lê at his home, where we discussed his photo-weaving technique, his use of the haunting images of prisoners at the infamous Cambodian prison of Tuol Sleng, and his decision to return to Vietnam. Since then, Lê’s work has been selected for inclusion in the 50th Venice Biennale.

David Spalding: For many of us, Vietnam's complex history has been reduced to a handful of images —part Hollywood, part photojournalism—depicting the Vietnam-American War. Your installation Mot Coi Di Ve, (1999), a hanging curtain made of found photographs embellished with text, challenges this narrow view. How does this project relate to your personal history?

Dinh Q. Lê: I was born in Ha-Tien, South Vietnam, and lived there until I was about 11. The Vietnam War was over by then, but in 1977 and 1978, military conflicts between Cambodia and Vietnam were taking place. At that time Vietnam was a pretty harsh communist country, too. So between the Khmer Rouge invading my hometown and living here under a communist regime, my family decided to escape to Thailand by boat. We literally escaped at night, and we weren't able to bring our family photo albums or anything else. I think we ended up in the States with five photographs of our former lives, so I grew up with this feeling that l had no history. Living in the States as a newly arrived immigrant, you start your history when you arrive.

When I first returned to Vietnam, I always went to antique shops and junk shops, looking for my family photographs. I was hoping that whatever photographs we had in the family would somehow end up in somebody's junk shop and that l might find them. Unfortunately, I never did. But along the way, I realized that, in a way, all these photographs were of my family. They were telling my family story. The people in these photographs look the way my family once did. I began wondering: what happened to the owners of these photographs? Like my family, did they escape the country and leave everything behind? Did they survive the war? That's the inspiration for the work. It's not about war; it's about the daily lives that we had to abandon. The initial idea was to create a complete quilt, but I found that I wanted to leave openings, because it's not a complete story. As more images are found, I can add to it. The title is also the title of a famous song. It means "spending one's life trying to return home.” The song ties in with what l was looking for: I was trying to find a way home.

DS: When Pol Pot seized control of Cambodia he set the calendars back to year zero. Perhaps there's a parallel between this and the erasure of immigrant histories, as if immigrants coming to the US find themselves at year zero—though not with the same kind of force.

DQL: But it's the same way of thinking. I remember the first time I came back to Vietnam, to Ha-Tien, which is where my family came from. My uncle took me to our family burial ground and it was such an amazing experience. Five or six generations of my family are buried there, and suddenly it was as if l was literally taking root. In the States, I just didn't feel it, and then I stood on this place and thought My god, I'm part of a tradition, I have a history and it goes back for a long time. That's a big part of why I decided to move back to Vietnam.

DS: In "Monument and Memory in the Postmodern Age," Andreas Huyssen suggests that memorials should leave some kind of openness for new stories and new associations, rather than creating a rigid, complete picture of past events—what he calls "frozen memory." Throughout your work, you've found such inventive ways to prevent history from freezing over. In The Texture of Memory, (2000-2001), the images of prisoners at Tuol Sleng are embroidered in white thread on white fabric. These ghostly faces will become more visible as viewers touch them, the oils from their hands darkening the thread. How did this project originate?

DQL: I read an article in the newspaper about four or five years ago about Cambodian women suffering from hysterical blindness, and it just sat in my head. It slowly came to me, this idea of Braille, and the idea of these women sitting there, rebuilding memory, stitch by stitch, as a way to reclaim lost history. The Texture of Memory was named after James F. Young's book of the same title. He talks about memorials throughout Europe and America and concludes that the memorials that are interactive are the ones that become successful. That's why The Texture of Memory has an interactive component, so that people can participate and become part of it.

DS: So for you the photographic image is never exactly frozen, it's always part of a larger story, a point of departure?

DQL: I think that people are mistaken to think that the photograph is fixed. You can always mutate or change it. With just the stroke of a pen, you can put a different caption under any photograph and tell a completely different story. So l don't see an image as a frozen thing—you can do anything to it. You can shred it up and weave it, if you want to!

DS: You began weaving photographs together as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. What motivated you to develop this technique?

DQL: I started making the photo-weavings because I wanted to talk about a kind of interweaving of identities, l was this Vietnamese guy that ended up in the States, and I was going to college and learning about western history, western art, and western thinking, so I was trying to locate myself in relation to all this. I was 19 or 20 years old when I began making the photo-weavings. The early work is very personal, made by a very confused person who was trying to figure out who he was in relation to America. My aunt was a grass mat weaver, and when I was young she taught me how to weave. At a certain point I figured that l could literally weave photographs together. With a double exposure everything's so seamless, but with the weaving the two images that are combined are physically forced to merge. It's not seamless, and I like that much more.

DS: You've made several different projects related to Cambodian history and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, including The Quality of Mercy, The Headless Buddha, The Texture of Memory, and Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness. After being away for so long, what prompted you to visit Cambodia? What is it about Cambodia that continues to inspire you?

DQL: In 1994 I did a workshop for Southeast Asian kids at the Bronx Museum in New York, and many of them were Cambodian American. Some of the parents also attended the workshop, and we started talking about my work and their experiences in Cambodia. One woman asked me to incorporate more images of the Buddha in my work, because Buddhism helped her to cope with what happened to her in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. I started to think back about my own experience when the Khmer Rouge invaded my hometown, and the horror that they created. I had avoided thinking about any of that for years. A couple months after that workshop, I quit my job and went back to Ha-Tien, my hometown. That really created a strong awakening of all these memories of the Khmer Rouge invasion.

One of the big questions for me after all these memories awoke was "How could a group of people be capable of such horror?" I went there and I was shocked. You know, one day you're at this horrific place where they killed 20,000 people—they tortured them and then they killed them—and then the next day you go to Siem Reap and visit these unbelievably beautiful temples. This contradiction is a huge thing for me. I keep going back to try to understand, to try to come to terms with how a culture that's capable of such beauty can also be capable of such horror.

DS: Your series Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness, (1998-2000), begins to break down these contradictions, drawing parallels between the Khmer Rouge and the ancient Angkor empire, literally weaving the faces of Cambodian prisoners into the reliefs of Angkor Wat.

DQL: When Pol Pot took the country over and herded people out into the countryside, I think he imagined that Angkor Wat would become this glorious empire because of agriculture. He didn't realize that the ancient Angkor Empire conquered many other countries: Thailand, Burma, South Vietnam and Laos. The looting of these countries built Cambodia into an empire at that time. But the temples also act as monuments to victory, because every time a king would come into his own, he would build a monument to himself. That's why I thought the images of the victims from Tuol Sleng would fit well with the images of the carvings on the temples. Inserting images of the dead into those monuments subverts them in a way, turning them into memorials, reminding us that for every monument that was built in Cambodia there are victims.

DS: Since their discovery in 1979, the photos taken at Tuol Sleng prison have been reproduced, circulated and displayed as art objects. What risks are involved in working with these images?

DQL: We can talk about [the] show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York [Photographs from S-21 1975 - 1979], for example. I think the show was poorly organized and didn't provide any context for the photographs. The images hadn't been mediated, so we're talking about prison photographs, not artworks. Prison photos had been blown up and displaced in an art context, and it was confusing. I think if they are 'contextualized' well, then those images are very powerful. Within my work, I've mediated the original image. And, in some ways, I feel like I'm keeping these people alive by using them in my work. Sometimes I worry about using them so many times, but I keep finding more stories to tell. They're such tough images to work with: if you fail a little bit, then it's a horrific thing, but if you can carry it off, then it can become something else, something amazing. •

David Spalding is a San Francisco-based critic who currently teaches contemporary art and critical theory at the California College of Arts and Crafts and Mills College.