“Drifting in this Dark Space”: A Conversation with Artist Dinh Q. Lê
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- “Drifting in this Dark Space”A Conversation with Artist Dinh Q. Lê
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 [End Page E-23] 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.
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Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (2012). Installation view of Dinh Q. Lê: Photographing the Thread of Memory at Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac (2022). 70 drawings: pencil, watercolor, ink and oil on paper. Photo courtesy Léo Delafontaine.
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)
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 [End Page E-24] [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...
