Although his practice encompassed works across many media, Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2024) was best known for his elaborate photo-weavings: strips of photographic paper interlaced to form tapestries of often incongruous imagery. He adapted this technique from traditional grass-mat weaving, a skill his aunt taught him during his childhood in Hà Tiên, near the Cambodian border. Nine photo-weavings were included in “Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995–2023,” among them an example from his breakout series From Vietnam to Hollywood, 2001–2005, exhibited to much acclaim at the 2003 Venice Biennale. For Immolation in Color, 2002, he painstakingly crisscrossed long, thin ribbons of chromogenic prints into a grid. The strips’ horizontal axis lines up images from big-budget Vietnam War films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon, while the vertical axis coalesces into journalist Malcolm Browne’s disturbing 1963 photograph of Buddhist monk Thích Quang Đúc self-immolating at a crowded Saigon intersection. The piece appropriates cinematic conventions to counter Hollywood’s grandiose, condescending fantasia of Vietnam. Its dimensions mimic wide-screen aspect ratios, while the woozy superimposition of images suggests the midpoint of a cross-fade, when two shots commingle in ghostly overlap. The work thus offers a multifaceted critique, counterposing the vainglorious artifice of American films against the real-life specter of human flesh burning in broad daylight. The dissonance between diametric paradigms—the crass illusionism of movies versus the principled decision to commit suicide as protest—underlines the fun house–mirror grotesqueries of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people call the American War.
Four photo-weavings in the gallery’s rear alcove referenced the Khmer Rouge’s invasion of southwestern Vietnam in 1978, which forced Lê’s family to flee to Thailand when he was ten. In Cambodia, 1995, and Untitled (Tuol Sleng and Angkor Temple), ca. 1998, serene imagery of Buddhist and Hindu statuary contrasts with mug shots of prisoners interred, tortured, and murdered in Tuol Sleng, Phnom Penh’s most notorious extermination center. Untitled (Gandara Buddha with Sistine Chapel), ca. 1997, and Untitled (Self-portrait with Angel), 1997, suggest the uneasiness the artist felt as a refugee in Thailand and, later, an émigré in the United States—a perennial outsider wedged between cultures. In the self-portrait, he depicts himself caged inside the robes of an angel depicted in the Pérussis Altarpiece, 1480, which he encountered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (he lived in the city from 1990 to 1992, while studying for his MFA at the School of Visual Arts). Peering out through prison bars, subsumed within an adopted culture’s Judeo-Christian iconography, he meets the viewer’s gaze stoically, a visual echo of the faces of doomed Tuol Sleng internees.
Lê’s ties to the Pacific Northwest, although not widely known, were tacitly acknowledged in the exhibition. His first home in the US was in the farming town of Banks, Oregon, where his family lived briefly before relocating to Los Angeles. Nearly three decades later, in 1996, gallerist Elizabeth Leach met the twentysomething artist in Seattle, where he was visiting friends, and was so taken with his ideas and photo-weavings that she signed him on the spot. Hers was the first commercial gallery to represent him. He went on to have nine solo shows in Portland between 1996 and 2023, dying of a stroke a year later at the age of only fifty-six. With Leach’s encouragement in the early 2000s, he began to think of the gallery as a creative incubator for developing experimental and conceptual work. Several of those works were included in the survey. In a readymade titled The Infrastructure of Nationalism, 2009, he festooned a bicycle with Vietnamese flags—a common presentation for selling patriotic souvenirs in Southeast Asia—reimagining the colorful decorations as a commentary on the ubiquity of pro-government symbols. The Last of the Alchemists, 2013, a four-and-a-half-foot-long lacquer box adorned with silver leaf, contained over 160 feet of unexposed photographic paper. The box is sealed, the material never to be touched by the light of day. Created as he transitioned from film to digital photography, it functions as a reliquary for the lapsed alchemy of the darkroom. More tomb than container, the work’s elegiac tenor permeated the exhibition, which coincided with the first anniversary of Lê’s untimely death and the fiftieth anniversary of the Vietnam War’s conclusion. The unexposed, unprocessed film seemed an apt metaphor for the unfinished work of a life and career cut short.