Dinh Q Lê

SIMPLY UNFORGETTABLE
By Andrew Maerkle


Everything Is a Re-Enactment (2015), single-channel color video with sound, military uniforms, 26 min. Commissioned by the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015.

Born in Vietnam, raised and educated in the US from the age of 10, and now based in Ho Chi Minh City, Dinh Q Lê has built up a unique multimedia practice that turns images into a vehicle for moving between and recombining disparate contexts. Western fantasies about Vietnam and the Vietnam War that have been given form and circulate the world as Hollywood movies are one of the key materials with which Lê works. In revealing, through his mixed-media pieces weaving together stills from Hollywood movies with documentary photographs from Vietnam and Cambodia, for example, or in identifying the strange Oedipal tension between the films Apocalypse Now and Platoon, starring real-life father-son actors Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen, respectively, as he does in From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage (2007), Lê shows how these fantasies are inherently constructed, and therefore alterable. His works not only establish the artist’s individual agency over the international narrative of what Vietnam is and what it represents, but they also engage universal questions about the nature of fantasy and representation.

Lê is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, “Memory for Tomorrow,” which opened July 25. With its themes of war and remembrance, the exhibition offers poignant commentary on this year’s 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Commissioned by the Mori Art Museum, Lê has made a new work in Japan, Everything Is a Re-enactment (2015), which ties together the Vietnamese and Japanese contexts. ART iT met with Lê after the opening of his exhibition to discuss his work in greater detail.

Dinh Q Lê: Memory for Tomorrow” continues at the Mori Art Museum through October 12.

Interview:

ART iT: Looking through the exhibition here, one thing that struck me about your work is that it seems to be driven by an investigation into how we deal with images: images as representations, images as shared fantasies, images as commodities and as things. Could you talk about this aspect of your work?

DQL: I think you’re familiar with the fact that the Vietnam War is the most mediated war in history, and all those images have produced a highly problematic image of Vietnam that is perpetuated to this day. I am interested in how those images represent Vietnam to the world, but at the same time my own identity is attached to those same images, so I am also interested in how it might be possible to take back control of those images. Over the years that has certainly been a driving force of my work.


Above: The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006), three-channel color video with sound, 15 min, with handcrafted full-size helicopter, 250 x 1,070 x 350 cm. Collaborating artists: Tran Quoc Hai, Le Van Danh, Phu-Nam Thuc Ha, Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Commissioned by Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Installation view at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015, photo Nagare Satoshi, courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Below: Untitled (Paramount) (2003), C-print and linen tape, 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Collection Ann and Mel Schaffer Family, New York. Photo courtesy Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington.

ART iT: The installation here of The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006) is really impressive, with the actual helicopter presented across from the video projections. My attention was first drawn to the helicopter, which was so much larger than I expected it to be, but as I was inspecting it, I happened to look up at the screens just in time to see footage of a swarm of helicopters sweeping across the fields of Vietnam. It was a powerful moment of translation between object and screen.

DQL: The helicopter is telling the story of those other helicopters – that’s why I’m interested in them as objects. They have their own stories. Objects are a kind of witness, and they make the story more real. Another thing I find fascinating is that when I show the video alone, without the helicopter, the viewers always think the helicopter is small, but once they see the real thing, it gives them a completely different impression and understanding of these two guys’ desire and what they are trying to do.

ART iT: Beyond the relations between object and image, the relations between touch and image also recur in your work, as in your woven photographs, like Untitled (Paramount) (2003), interweaving a go-go dancer in a blue cowgirl outfit with a black-and-white photo of a man carrying the body of a child. These works emphasize the idea of the image as an object, rather than as a screen or projection.

DQL: The weaving provides a completely different kind of sensation to that of a “flat” image. With the weaving, there’s a texture and a layering that makes you ask, what’s the second layer? What’s hidden on top of the first layer? I think it makes it easier for people to understand that, beyond what you can see on the surface of an image, there are even more layers hidden underneath that you can’t completely grasp.
The two images are vying for dominancy in the field of pixels and strips, and that in a way was my attempt to break the dominancy of the Hollywood images.

ART iT: Were you already thinking of pixels when you started making the works?

DQL: I always think of the weaving in terms of pixels, because weaving is the first binary structure. Maybe not exactly from the start, but certainly over the years I have been working on the project, and particularly after the first body of work in the late 1980s, I was aware of that relationship.

ART iT: The weaving pieces actually have a very thick feel to them, and also this strange burnt effect around the edges.

DQL: The burning effect started out as a way to hold all the strips together, but it also gives the piece a physicality that a straight edge cannot. It’s as if the images went through something – an event or process – and arrived here in that form. It suggests a somewhat violent process, because it was burned or seared. I use a propane torch to do it. The color paper is plastic, so when you burn it, it fuses together.


Above: Untitled (Double Woman) (2003), C-print and linen tape, 96.5 x 182.9 cm. Collection Keith Recker and James Mohn. Below: Erasure (2011), single-channel color video with sound, found photographs, stone, wooden boat fragments, wood walkway, computer, scanner, dedicated website (erasurearchive.net), dimensions variable, video 7 min. Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2011; supported by Nicholas and Angela Curtis. Installation view at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015, photo Nagare Satoshi, courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

ART iT: With your installation Erasure (2011), you turn touch into a mechanism for collapsing different times: the act of physically bending over and picking up one of the photos lying on the floor transports viewers to different times and realities. For example, I picked up a portrait of a young woman which had the dateline, “Saigon, August 1, 1960,” inscribed on its back, and all of a sudden there was a direct connection for me between that moment in the past and the moment of the present.

DQL: I think the work collapses three different times. There are contemporary events, and my own personal history as a “boat person,” and also the journey from Europe to Australia of the colonizers of Australia.
Touching the photographs creates an intimate connection. I felt that was necessary in the Australian context where I originally made the work, because the discussion about boat migrants there has been so problematic. In the way they speak about it, they almost refuse to consider these people as human beings. The act of picking up a photograph and looking at it forces you to think about them as people again. At least that was the desired effect.

ART iT: The new piece you shot here in Japan, Everything Is a Re-Enactment (2015), seems like a departure from your works dealing with images of Vietnam, but would you say there is a continuity in the way that you question the lines between fantasy and reality, and how we relate to history?

DQL: For the subject of the film, Mr Nakaura, it’s like life and fantasy have merged together, and there are no boundaries. That’s what is so fascinating about him. In the video itself, I felt it was important to constantly disrupt the fantasy on the screen, by including scenes of the cameraman directing him and so on. Today all of us live so much of our lives in the realm of fantasy now, whether through Hollywood or the Internet. With all this information floating around, there’s not much separation.

ART iT: How did you find Nakaura?

DQL: I have been interested in Yasukuni Shrine and its related controversies for some time, and have been to visit the military and war museum there – which is so problematic – so I had seen people like him hanging around the shrine grounds in full uniform, especially on the August 15 weekend. When the Mori Art Museum approached me about commissioning a work, I decided to go back to the shrine on August 15, because I wanted to understand more about these people. For example, there are older men who maybe were involved in the war or were children during that period, so there’s some kind of direct connection, but with someone like Nakaura, who is 40 years old, born 30 years after the war ended, it’s harder to understand. What makes these people like this?
So we went to see. There were many people there. The obviously crazy ones didn’t interest me, because being crazy is something you can dismiss. But Nakaura was very shy. He was dressed up, but hiding behind one of the shrines, and that piqued my curiosity. Why would you go through all the effort of dressing up, only to hide? I thought he must have some conviction that he has to be there, something that goes beyond showing off. We started talking to him, and then we found out about his participation in a Vietnam War reenactment group. So it became really strange, jumping from my interest in Yasukuni Shrine to Vietnam War reenactments.
My first idea was to film the reenactment group in action, but the leader felt that Vietnamese people might find it offensive that a bunch of grown Japanese men are dressing up and reenacting this painful experience, so he declined my proposal and the focus turned to Nakaura alone.

ART iT: So the nature of the project changed the moment you met Nakaura?

DQL: Yes. I think I was interested in him as a symptom of Japan, and the lack of open discussion here about the country’s actions during World War II. Most people quietly accept that it happened and move on and ignore the whole thing, but there’s always a small number who keep trying to understand. I recognized something of myself in Nakaura, because you could say I’m also a little obsessed with the Vietnam War, and I wanted to learn more about his obsession with war and his seriousness in learning about it: he and his group do intensive research for every reenactment.
But at the same time, because there isn’t so much open discussion about the war in Japan, I feel that Nakaura had to learn about it on his own and his journey took him to a very problematic place and connected him with problematic people. As a result, his views have become twisted and surreal.

ART iT: I thought Nakaura is portrayed quite sympathetically in the film – he comes across as a more-or-less likeable person – and perhaps you could have further challenged his views.

DQL: What I’m interested in is that there’s something infantile in him. At the start of the film you see very clearly how he is like a kid showing us his toys. And I think there is a criticism in showing him as this childlike person. In my work I’m interested not in making a direct challenge but rather simply presenting this very strange man. For someone who is informed about all these issues, his argument is so problematic and surreal that I felt there was no need to say anything else. Who could believe it? But maybe people in Japan will read it differently.


Above: Everything Is a Re-Enactment (2015). Below: Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (2012), installation of 100 drawings in pencil, watercolor, ink, and oil on paper / single-channel color video with sound, dimensions variable; video 35 min. Collection Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, The Henry L. Hillman Fund, 2013.37.1-102. Installation view at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015, photo Nagare Satoshi, courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

ART iT: Quite a number of your works involve working with found footage, while with The Helicopters and the Farmers you mixed found footage and straightforward documentary footage. How was it working this time with a full camera crew?

DQL: First of all, after meeting Nakaura and talking with him and realizing how surreal he is, I already knew that I wanted the aesthetic of the film to be different from what I had done previously. I had something in mind for creating a surreal story, but the structure of the film evolved in a spontaneous way once we were on location. For example, the dressing scene was not a planned shoot. I asked him if we could film his home and he agreed. It was only when we got there that we found his treasure trove of uniforms. I immediately asked him whether we could film him trying them on, and he was up for it. So that became the beginning of the film, because he was so happy to show us all this stuff.
One of my earlier ideas was to have him in uniform telling his story to the hostesses at the bar where he works, but the bar owner said no to that. So originally there was going to be even more of a mixing up of reality and fantasy.

ART iT: We were talking about we deal with images as both physical things and as representations and symbols, but you have these two recent works about the communist military field artists and the artist Tran Trung Tin, Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (2012) and Vision in Darkness (2015), respectively, which question about how we define art itself, and how we use it as a shared space of communication and exchange. This is a line of questioning that often comes up in Japan as well, because we have such a tortured relationship to the Western concept of art here.

DQL: It was interesting for me to learn about Leonard Foujita, the Japanese artist who painted propagandistic “War Campaign Record Paintings,” and then after the war was criticized so intensely that he left the country.
In Vietnam we are still a communist country and censorship is dominant. We struggle with it everyday. These works helped me to understand the role those artists played in the war, and it gave me perspective on the role I play now, even though the context has changed, and may not be as difficult as it once was. So the work is motivated partly by a desire to understand what they went through in order to help me deal with the Vietnamese government today, and think about the choices I need to make now and the choices I might have made had I been active during that time.

ART iT: I thought you gave the war artists the kind of dignity that they deserve.

DQL: Yes. I didn’t know any of them when I started out. It was only through the process of talking that I came to understand them. And so once all the interviews were done, I had a very different image of who they are. Originally Tran Trung Tin was going to be part of the first film as a counter narrative, but after interviewing all the communist artists, I developed a grudging respect for them, and it was out of that respect that we split the project into two distinct films, giving each side its own complete argument rather than trying to undermine one or the other.
It’s like they are two chapters. Each can exist on its own, but I hope that when you see them together it prompts you to question what you just saw. You fall in love with them, but when you see the next work, you start questioning that love, and it becomes very complicated, as I’m constantly being reminded in my own life and practice. That’s why 20 years since I first started, I’m still making work about the Vietnam War, because there’s no right answer. It’s so complicated all the time.

ART iT: Maybe you can push it even further and say that Tran Trung Tin emerges as something of the classical individualist “dissident” artist, who is easy for Western audiences to appreciate.

DQL: Perhaps, but he started out as a believer in the communist cause, and then he changed. I sometimes question myself: under the same conditions, would I have been a Tran Trung Tin, or a party artist? There are times I think I would end up as a party artist, because there’s a kind of nationalist spirit that can overwhelm anybody, and it’s hard to resist.
But there are all these ideological twists in any society. The scholar Moira Roth wrote a beautiful essay called “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” which looks at the Abstract Expressionist artists. Her argument is that they avoided political issues altogether because of the Red Scare at the time, so it was like they were retreating into individualism, rather than dealing with the reality. She presents them not as heroes trying to break out of the stronghold of European art, but as cowards.


Installation view of Dinh Q Lê, “Memory for Tomorrow” at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015. Photo Nagare Satoshi, courtesy the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

ART iT: In addition to working as an artist, you are one of the co-founders of the art space Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City. As I understand it, the goal of the space is to provide an alternative to the mainstream academic structure in Vietnam. Do you ever find that it requires a delicate balance between respecting what makes sense to the local community and negotiating international art practice?

DQL: We’re a very small organization based in a city of 11 or 12 million people. Our focus has changed over our eight years of existence. At first we were not so interested in the general audience, because there was no way we could serve everybody. We were more interested in building a community of artists who are thinking about contemporary practice, new forms and new mediums. We were interested in supporting each other by providing a place for discussion and experimentation and failure.
But over the years that’s changed. The painters who have a certain aesthetic based on the French school or social realism know that Sàn Art is not the place for them, but I think the art school itself has gradually developed a kind of respect for us. The teachers lack knowledge about contemporary art, but the world has moved on; their students are interested in contemporary art, but they can’t teach them because they don’t have the information. So they train the young artists in technical skills, and then the young artists come to us for following up. That has been an interesting change in the relationship. It’s a grudging respect. Our communities have come to terms with one another. I think that’s the key point.
But over the past two years our director, Zoe Butt, has also created new programs and changed the role of our organization. Now we also hold lectures and workshops where we bring in intellectuals from the outside, because there’s a lack of intellectual life in Ho Chi Minh City. Not so many artists and people in our community are aware that all different fields of knowledge are connected. They keep thinking that each area is separate from the next. So we want to bring a diversity of fields together in the same space. We invite mathematicians, archaeologists, historians and artists to come and give workshops to help our artists see the connections between different fields of knowledge, and then they can approach their own art with a broader way of understanding it.

ART iT: There are a number of artists from the Vietnamese diaspora who are enjoying international success right now, but the very nature of a diaspora is that in some way it’s a community of difference. For example, I just happened to interview An-My Lê recently, who was 15 when her family left Vietnam for the US at the end of the war, and then there’s someone like Danh Vo, who was raised in Denmark, and then yourself with your own experience. To the extent that there is a shared history, everyone also has an entirely unique context and perspective.

DQL: I think that’s a good way of putting it. Some of us were born after the war, and some before, but somehow we all slowly come to deal with it through our work, one way or another. So the question is, why? I think somehow, maybe through our parents, or maybe through the media, we inherited this event, whether we like it or not, and that is what drives this need to address it.

ART iT: Perhaps this opens up room for destabilizing the idea of the “master narrative” itself: even if it’s something everybody shares, there is no single master narrative. Certainly, I appreciate your attempts to change the master narrative about Vietnam, because I feel that in the US in the 1980s, when I was growing up, there was no room for seeing things from the Vietnamese perspective.

DQL: Even today – if the Vietnamese-Americans saw what I’ve been doing, I’d be in trouble! But I think time and distance do make a difference. A whole new generation of Vietnamese-Americans have been born, and I think they are ready for it. Many of them are coming back to Vietnam to learn about the country and culture. Already 40 years have passed since the war ended, and the people who were most invested in it, whether American or Vietnamese, have all retired and are in a different place now. Maybe all the anger has subsided, and we can find the space for communication.

Dinh Q Lê: Simply Unforgettable

Copyrighted Image