Dinh Q. Lê
The Deep Blue Sea Installation View, 2017
Four color photographs (FujiColor Crystal Archive) with gold lacquer boxes (4 different artwork scrolls priced individually)
5000 x 127 cm
The Deep Blue Sea is an installation of photographic scrolls by internationally acclaimed artist Dinh Q. Lê. Best known for his large-scale photographic weavings and video works, Lê had developed...
The Deep Blue Sea is an installation of photographic scrolls by internationally acclaimed artist Dinh Q. Lê. Best known for his large-scale photographic weavings and video works, Lê had developed an artistic practice that insists on a deeper engagement with the way global crisis is perceived and understood.
Dinh Q. Lê appropriated four images from the boat refugee crises in the Mediterranean Sea to create a cascading scroll installation. Each work stretches a single image across a 150-foot expanse of photo paper. These journalistic images distort into data-like bands of pigment – a feat that would have been impossible in the days of dark room printing. Overturning Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “precise moment,” Lê here argues for a more fluid view of history, one that accounts for all of the small moments that compose the pivotal events permanently etched in our historical memory. Although this work uses recent history as its subject matter, it also echoes Lê’s personal history, when his family escaped Vietnam by boat in 1978.
The installation expands Lê’s investigation, providing a platform for him to test the boundaries of the photographic medium. Through digital technology, Lê was able to literally extend celluloid creating a material metaphor for the ways in which images continue to shade our views of the world. His use of a scroll evokes the art-historical tradition of Chinese landscape paintings, which tells the cumulative story of an event by virtue of the length of the scroll on which it was painted. Through these works, Lê asks the viewers to experience the image as an abstract canvas, denying the viewers an obvious narrative. Instead they are encouraged to pull together narratives based on the abstract information given, and what their memories can recall.
In the works of The Deep Blue Sea, photography is not merely an image but it is rife with sculptural and conceptual potential. By stretching from ceiling to floor and then coiling back on itself in rhythmic folds, Lê’s photographic installations use arresting scale to scrutinize the significance of still frames in our collective culture. Investigating photographic processes and cultural memory through the Buddhist doctrine of anicca, or impermanence, these works expose the mutable meaning of journalistic images which aim to concretize a fractional moment of time.
Dinh Q. Lê appropriated four images from the boat refugee crises in the Mediterranean Sea to create a cascading scroll installation. Each work stretches a single image across a 150-foot expanse of photo paper. These journalistic images distort into data-like bands of pigment – a feat that would have been impossible in the days of dark room printing. Overturning Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “precise moment,” Lê here argues for a more fluid view of history, one that accounts for all of the small moments that compose the pivotal events permanently etched in our historical memory. Although this work uses recent history as its subject matter, it also echoes Lê’s personal history, when his family escaped Vietnam by boat in 1978.
The installation expands Lê’s investigation, providing a platform for him to test the boundaries of the photographic medium. Through digital technology, Lê was able to literally extend celluloid creating a material metaphor for the ways in which images continue to shade our views of the world. His use of a scroll evokes the art-historical tradition of Chinese landscape paintings, which tells the cumulative story of an event by virtue of the length of the scroll on which it was painted. Through these works, Lê asks the viewers to experience the image as an abstract canvas, denying the viewers an obvious narrative. Instead they are encouraged to pull together narratives based on the abstract information given, and what their memories can recall.
In the works of The Deep Blue Sea, photography is not merely an image but it is rife with sculptural and conceptual potential. By stretching from ceiling to floor and then coiling back on itself in rhythmic folds, Lê’s photographic installations use arresting scale to scrutinize the significance of still frames in our collective culture. Investigating photographic processes and cultural memory through the Buddhist doctrine of anicca, or impermanence, these works expose the mutable meaning of journalistic images which aim to concretize a fractional moment of time.