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Dinh Q. Lê Anxious Tapestries
by Christopher Miles
I have known Dinh Q. Lê and have admired his woven photographic works, for a number of years. It is therefore difficult for me to separate my personal sense of Lê's art from my consideration of how this art might affect other viewers. Lately, however, Ie become increasingly convinced that, at least in some instances, the most effective critical examinations of art are in fact grounded in personal reflection. Such an intermingling, such a weaving, of personal response and detached analysis is the only way I can imagine to comment on Lê's art - not because I know the artist and have a history of contact with the work, but because along the path of that history, I have found no point at which the experience of his work can be anything but personal.
I tend not to dwell on biography - my own or that of an artist I am writing about - but I do find from time to time that biographical information can be helpful, not so much for divining hidden meanings in art but for understanding how art resonates. Lê and I were born in the same year, though separated by measurable distances - and measurable in different ways. Lê spent most of his childhood in Vietnam; I spent mine in the United States. Lê's formative years infolded in a place defined by the import and intervention of outside ideology, influence, and might most notably in the form of the Vietnam War and in the violent incursions of Cambodia's Khmer Rough into Vietnam, something the artist experienced firsthand as a young boy. Among my earliest memories are nights when, wanting to stay up past my bedtime, I would sneak out of bed and make my way into the living room, where night after night I would find my parents and elder siblings watching news reports about the conflict in Southeast Asia. This is when I began to understand, in some fashion, that there were far-off places where big things were going on.
Vietnam - a very direct frame of experience for Lê - was for me, and I believe for many children of my generation growing up far from that part of the globe, an odd and variously skewed frame of reference. I note these parallels not for the sake of trying to establish some sort of experiential equivalency (as there really is none), or to propose some kind of cosmic connection between the artist and myself, but rather to convey how and why I have taken interest in, and felt an impact from, Lê's work, and to suggest to those who might think it is distant, removed, or foreign that it is closer than they think. Lê's work has as much to do with an American kid watching television as with a Vietnamese child witnessing a massacre. If it didn't, it wouldn't carry the charge that it does.
Lê's work deals with the strange, complicated layers of means - from the most direct to the most medicated - through which personal histories weave with larger histories and mythologies. For both Lê and me, 1979 was an important year in terms of becoming aware of the sorts of weaving and crossings that would later inform his making and my viewing. It was the year when Lê quite literally traveled west and I quite figuratively was transported east. It was the year when Lê and his family, having fled from Vietnam to Thailand, immigrated to the United States. It was the year when I persuaded my older brothers to sneak me into an R-rated film called Apocalypse Now.
Ten years later - after the decade that brought us Full Metal Jacket and Rambo, the rise of a large Southeast Asian immigrant population in the United States, the beginnings of rapprochement between America and Vietnam, lingering anxieties over the war's unfinished business and emerging history, and the entering into adulthood of a generation born into that era of conflict - Lê and I met as classmates at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he first began making the woven photo pieces for which he has become known. Using simple handwork method he had learned while weaving grass mats with his aunt, Lê began weaving together strips cut from large color photographs and carefully burning the edges of the weavings to fuse the strips together and create a finished border. The results were compositions in which multiple images vie for dominance and significance as they obscure and reveal one another. They generate a kind of shimmer, both optically and psychologically, leaving the viewer grasping for the totality of each of the partially displayed images, as well as grasping at the implications of their intertwining. Associative traces jump between the images, which coexist in relationships that seem at times harmonious, and at other times rooted in a kind of truce negotiated by the artist. I still remember the amazement I felt on viewing those early works. The weaving patterns did not yet seem to be fully exploited for their potential to punctuate the work, and the combinations of images, culled from the East and the West, seemed rooted in basic pairings and obvious dualities compared with the more complex relationships established in subsequent pieces. But even then, the works left me simultaneously mesmerized and uncomfortable. I remember thinking that Lê had hit on a way of working that functioned as both an effective method and a powerful metaphor in addressing his personal experience and his takes on history and culture.
Since that time, Lê produced woven pieces incorporating images of figures and scenes posed and photographed by the artist; photos documenting architecture and sculpture; and countless images appropriated from sources as varies as oldmaster paintings, thrift-store portraits, news photos, mug shots, and Hollywood movies. The source material spans history and the globe, with heavy doses from Southeast Asia, Europe, and America. Works from the mid-1990s wove self-portraits and images of stand-in figures with Eastern and Western religious images. These were followed by works in which ancient Buddhas and Renaissance Christs mingled with groupings of male and female Asian faces, young and old. Later came perhaps the most haunting of Lê's woven pieces, a series in which the artist used decorative weaving patterns to intertwine photos of statues, temples, and stone carvings from the great ancient Khmer city of Angkor Wat with photos of genocide victims taken at the modern Khmer Rough prison of Tuol Sleng. Writing about the work at the time, I took note of, and still remember, a particularly telling piece that pictured a stone carving of the lone head of Kala, a gluttonous demon who ate everything until nothing was left and was then ordered by an angry Shiva to swallow his own body.
In the last few years, Lê has turned from pitting the contemporary against the distant past to pitting recent history against our own attempts to recall, eulogize, and mythologize it. Works from 2000 and 2001 weave black-and-white photojournalistic images shot during the Vietnam War with digitally enhanced (color-pumped) stills from such films as Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, and The Deer Hunter. These punchy works clearly led to Lê's most recent pieces, which have reached new levels of scale and complexity. For the first time, Lê is using digital imaging to combine images into compositions. Some are like patchwork quilts of photos, while others feel more like cinematic montages in which one image fades into the next. These compositions are printed out, cut into strips, and woven in the same manner as the earlier works, but with a dramatically boosted shimmer effect.
The pieces revolve around a cast of variously sexualized, politicized, and exoticized characters lifted from popular film, photojournalism, and the artist's own found and staged photographs. Among them are: the cowgirl-costumed Playboy Bunny and Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) from Apocalypse Now; the specters of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan and Viet Cong suspect Bay Lop, whose infamous execution was captured in Eddie Adams shocking photograph; and an anonymous young Asian woman pictured in a vintage (circa 1960s) studio portrait. These and other players fuse with their image-laden backdrops in bold and intricate works that take representations of intensified energies and hyperbolized ideologies as the wrap and woof of their heavy patterns and dense weavings - literal and figurative.
One could argue that Lê's woven photo works, especially the most recent ones, address many issues that shift from work to work, and I would agree with such an assessment. But I would propose that these works are in general about the complexities of weaving one's personal history with larger cultural histories. Lê works with images that inherently overlap and intertwine to varying degrees with the experiences, knowledge, and cultural inheritances of so many people who have been citizens of the world in the late twentieth century; and though I would shrink from claiming that the appeal of these works is universal, I find it hard to imagine a viewer for whom the experience of Lê's art does not become, in some way, personal. Indeed, not only do these majestic and anxious tapestries offer a glimpse into the artist process of weaving his own personal history (and perhaps his remembrance of it being woven for him) within a larger fabric of history and myth, but they also ask you, indeed compel you, as a viewer to consider your own interwoven status. It is difficult to look at one of these pieces without becoming in some way a participant. Even though looking at Lê's work may be uncomfortable, the process of getting lost in the weave of his photo fabrics is, in my experience, voluntary rather than compulsory. Viewing this work is not about taking your lashes or subjecting yourself to some sort of political correction. To scan the ins and outs of Lê's pieces is to see a little of the world through his eyes, but mostly through your own, and to stand in dazzled, confused, and conflicted awe of the fabric he lays out before you.
I would add that the awe involved in beholding these works is not just about reading the images and noting the traces and connections between them. Seldom do works that deal in "visual culture," as these works mostly do, have such a visceral impact; such works usually afford a distanced, intellectualized response. I often say that when it comes to art, I am a "reader," not a "feeler." and though I certainly prefer to err on the side of the former, I must admit that the separation is a contrivance, and I am amazed at the rare work of art that can force me into such an admission. No doubt, the semiotic shimmer and slippage unleashed in Lê's work is enough to keep the reader in me happy; but these works also manage to coax out, move, and at times overwhelm the feeler in me. They demand an instinctive and emotional response. I cannot think of an artist of my generation whose work has more consistently put me in such a position. I'm not sure how exactly Lê's photo-weavings do this to me, but if I had to guess, I would say that it must have something to do with Lê's consistency in selecting and combining images into conflicted tapestries that appear intimately familiar to almost anyone whose personal and cultural fabrics contain within their weave at least some strands of anxiety. Again, I comment here as an American who came of age in the era and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and as someone who registered, and still registers, the lingering anxieties of that tine and its legacies. In the late twentieth century, Southeast Asia served as a major import/export hub for anxiety, and if you've been alive and awake during the last few decades, you probably can't look at Lê's images without your fingers tightening or your breath quickening. Lê's work speaks, beneath its specifics, in fundamental terms of humanity and inhumanity.
Christopher Miles is a Los Angeles-based artist, curator, and writer. He is an assistant professor of Critical Theory in the Art Department at California State University, Long Beach. He taught previously in the graduate art programs at Claremont Graduate University; University of California Los Angeles; University of California, Santa Barbara; and University of Southern California. Miles is a frequent contributor to Artforum, Artforum.com, and Flaunt. His writings have also appeared in Art & Auction, Art Nexus, Art Papers, Art Scene, artext, Artweek, dArt, Detour, Flash Art, SOMA, Tema Celeste, X-Tra, and zingmagazine, among other publications.
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