HONG KONG, FEB——10 Chancery Lane Gallery presents Remembrance, a major tribute to the life and work of Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2024), one of the most influential contemporary artists to emerge from Southeast Asia. Curated by David Elliott, the exhibition honours an artist whose practice was driven by questions of memory, identity, history, and the unstable terrain between truth and representation.
Born in Hà Tiên, South Vietnam, in 1968, Dinh Q. Lê’s early childhood was shaped by war. In 1978, he fled Vietnam with his family, spending a year in a Thai refugee camp before resettling in the United States. Growing up as a Việt Kiều—never fully belonging to either Vietnam or America—Lê developed a lifelong inquiry into displacement, perception, and the politics of historical narrative. These experiences became the foundation of a practice that examined how images construct, distort, and contest collective memory.
Educated in fine art and photography in California and New York, Lê responded critically to the American cinematic portrayal of the Vietnam War, challenging its one-sided narratives. Photography became his primary medium, but he soon transformed it through his signature technique of photo-weaving, inspired by the grass mats woven by his aunt in Vietnam. By cutting and interlacing photographic strips, Lê created layered, tessellated surfaces in which past and present, fact and fiction, personal and political collide.
After returning to Vietnam in the 1990s and permanently relocating to Ho Chi Minh City in 1997, Lê confronted the silences surrounding the war and its aftermath. Works such as Cambodia: Splendour and Darkness (1998) and Hill of Poisonous Tree (2008) reflect his engagement with the traumatic histories of both Vietnam and Cambodia, weaving together archival imagery, prison mugshots, and fragments of Angkor Wat to evoke dignity amid devastation.
In the celebrated series From Vietnam to Hollywood (2004), Lê juxtaposed film stills, news photography, found vernacular images, and art historical references to examine the unbalanced way in which the Vietnam War was mythologized through Western cinema. His woven compositions destabilize dominant narratives, creating visual fields where histories overlap and meanings interweave.
Other major works—including South China Sea Pishkun (2009), Vietnam Inc. (2007), Tropicana Fantasy (2015), Glitter’s Paradise (2015), and Skin on Skin (2018)—extend his inquiry into contemporary Vietnam. Addressing rapid economic development, tourism, censorship, sexual politics, and the contradictions of globalization, Lê exposed the merging of communist symbolism and capitalist spectacle, public morality and private desire. His art consistently revealed the gaps between ideology and lived reality.
Beyond his artistic practice, Lê was a vital catalyst in Vietnam’s contemporary art scene. In 2007, he opened his studio and library as a gathering space for artists, an initiative that evolved into Sàn Art and later the Sàn Art Laboratory—an internationally recognized platform fostering dialogue, experimentation, and critical education in a context shaped by bureaucratic constraint and state censorship. Through openness and collaboration, Lê helped build a generation of artists who continue to shape the region’s cultural landscape.
Throughout his career, Lê exhibited internationally in major museums and biennales, bringing Southeast Asian perspectives into global discourse. Yet his work remained grounded in a deeply humane vision: a belief in the right to freedom, in the necessity of questioning inherited narratives, and in the power of images to both wound and heal.
Remembrance celebrates an artist who wove together fractured histories and contested truths with compassion, precision, and quiet defiance. In revealing how everything—memory, ideology, commerce, trauma—“merges and weaves in and out of each other,” Dinh Q. Lê leaves a legacy that continues to resonate across generations and geographies.
