The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 28 (2017)
Copyright © 2017 Takashi Aso. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Ethics of the Transpacific:
Dinh Q. Lê, Sàn Art, and Memories of War

Takashi ASO*

In this article I address the question of transculture in the context of what
is known as the transpacific. My example is Dinh Q. Lê, one of the bestknown Vietnamese American artists of the early twentieth-first century.
After a series of successes both inside and outside the United States, Lêreturned to his native country in the late 1990s to Ho Chi Minh City or, as it
is known by most Vietnamese people from the south living overseas,“Saigon,” the capital of the former Republic of Vietnam. In 2007 he createdan international art space in Saigon called Sàn Art for local Vietnamese
artists to learn about contemporary art and to present their works to the
public, even though he himself had never been allowed to exhibit his works
in his homeland under the strict censorship of the socialist government. Lê’s
return to Vietnam, which I view as an example of the transpacific movementof transculture, was quite unusual for overseas Vietnamese, who are known
as Viet Kieu, because the socialist policies of integrated Vietnam have beenviewed skeptically by Western nations, including the United States, despite
their current friendly relations. Lê has been trying, under these difficult
circumstances, to reestablish international ties, including his own, with
Vietnam. In the following, I analyze Lê’s commitment to the international
and Vietnamese contemporary art scenes and seek to clarify the ways inwhich he introduces new perspectives from which to view the relationshipbetween the United States and Vietnam. In this way, the American presence
in both international culture and politics can be understood within a broader*Professor, Waseda University

34

TAKASHI ASO

context of the transpacific.
I.

DINH Q. LÊ AND HIS RETURN TO VIETNAM

The year 2015, forty years after the fall of Saigon, turned out to be amemorable one for multimedia artist Dinh Q. Lê, for he successfully opened
Memory for Tomorrow, his first full-scale solo exhibition in Asia, at the Mori
Art Museum in Tokyo.1 Since the early 1990s when he started his career as aprofessional artist, Lê has held a number of exhibitions, both solo andcollective, in Australia, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, as well as in
major US cities. Memory for Tomorrow is exceptional in that viewers areable to trace Lê’s artistic career from the Vietnam War Posters (1989),
apprentice works that he produced when he was still an undergraduate at the
University of California at Santa Barbara, to Everything Is a Re-Enactment(2015), a video installation that he created for this exhibition. In addition,
among the works exhibited in Tokyo is Damaged Genes (1998), which
consists of small figures of deformed children and adults, sometimes with
two heads and/or four hands. These figures and their clothing are symbolic
representations of the devastating aftereffects of Agent Orange. Lê produced
them in Vietnam as “commercial products” rather than works of art in order
to circumvent governmental censorship while publicizing his message in his
homeland.2 Overall, viewers at this exhibition are meant to appreciate thereason why an artist such as Dinh Q. Lê could only have emerged in the
United States in the late twentieth century. At the same time, they are asked
to reflect on the blurred position in which Lê is located, that is, a space inbetween the United States and Vietnam, democracy and socialism, the art
world and the market economy, and more than anything, in between war andpeace.
Lê is typical of diasporic artists. Born in 1968 in a town called Hà Tiênnear the Cambodian border in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, Lêleft the country in 1978 after the Khmer Rouge’s invasion of his hometown
during the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. His family were boat people
hoping to get to the United States. Lê earned a bachelor of fine arts degree inphotography in California and then a master of fine arts degree at the Schoolof Visual Arts in New York City. He has become successful in digital media
art. Lê is most famous for a technique of his own invention called “photoweaving,” which was inspired by a traditional Vietnamese art of making
grass mats. This can be seen in, for example, Persistence of Memory (2000–
2001) and From Vietnam to Hollywood (2003–2005). His works also include

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

5

videos such as From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage (2007) and South
China Sea Pishkun (2009) as well as life-size installations of a Vietnamese
helicopter in The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006) and a stranded ship in
Erasure (2011), in addition to simple photographs with ironic messages suchas Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium (2005). These works arewidely recognized as examples of transculture, that is, as being a hybrid of
American and Vietnamese cultures, and Lê is regarded as a diasporiccosmopolitan agent in the sense that his actions and contributions to theinternational community highlight “the interplay of transnational migrations
and movements of people and cultural practices that cannot be covered by
the concepts of (usually one-way) emigration—immigration—acculturation
processes” (Lenz 396).
Curiously, in the early 1990s, just when his works were receiving more
and more attention in the West, Lê decided to return to Vietnam. After atransitional period from 1993 to 1997 during which he went back and forth
between the United States and Vietnam, he finally settled in the latter.3 This
resettlement was not only unusual, it may well have been suicidal for theartistic career of a Viet Kieu artist such as Dinh Q. Lê, because back then(and even today) freedom of expression in Vietnam was severely restricted,
particularly in the field of contemporary art. Naturally, his moving back to
Vietnam was a real surprise to many of his colleagues and supporters. Lêhimself, however, felt that “there was something deep down that drew [himto Vietnam]” (Lê’s e-mail to Roth in 2012, qtd. in Roth 139). As Zoe Butt,curator and program development director for Sàn Art, reports, the artist
thought that “it was the best decision he ever made” (“Locating” 127),
because, as a refugee child having grown up in California, Lê barely
remembered Vietnam. He had had a very difficult time sorting out what he
was able to remember about his homeland from the ideas of Vietnam that hehimself had composed out of images gleaned from mainstream American
media, including war films and photographs. In a 2010 interview with Zoe
Butt, Lê clarified that one of his reasons for returning was “to determine for[him]-self [his] own memories and contexts of who [he] was as aVietnamese” (“The Pilgrimage” par. 2).
Without a doubt, this need to identify “as a Vietnamese” is shared by mostof the “one-and-a-half,”4 as well as second-generation overseas Vietnamese.
In fact, a number of Vietnamese Americans of these generations have
traveled to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since the 1995 normalizationof relations between the United States and Vietnam, and their back-and-forthtravels have resulted in the creation of important works in culture and6

TAKASHI ASO

literature, such as Andrew Pham’s essay Catfish and Mandala (1999), G. B.
Tran’s graphic novel Vietnamerica (2011), and Lan Cao’s epic novel The
Lotus and the Storm (2014). Except for Dinh Q. Lê, however, there havebeen few major Vietnamese American artists who have decided to settle inVietnam.5 Their reasons not to move back vary. Many of them are highly
suspicious of the socialist regime, while a few are still afraid of facing thehard reality that they have left behind and have yet to accept.6
Obviously, Lê is radically different from typical Viet Kieu travelers withnostalgic sentiments. He is not, however, another desolate, delicate
pessimist who anticipates the worst in returning to his homeland. Rather, he
has defiantly helped to establish a community of contemporary artists in
Vietnam. Thus he conceived the idea of starting the nonprofit Sàn Art in Ho
Chi Minh City. The word “Sàn” means “platform” in Vietnamese; he choseit to indicate that he expected the organization to support local artists,
facilities, and contemporary art in Vietnam. The project began in 2007, a
decade after Lê’s resettlement in his homeland. After his return, Lê foundthat Vietnamese art was not merely old-fashioned but that artists wereisolated from the international community of contemporary art due togovernmental censorship of anything political or consideredantigovernment. Even though market economics had been introduced in
Vietnam and the deregulation of business and industry had already begun inorder to attract foreign investors, art was still a closed-off area in which thegovernment strictly limited individuals’ freedom of expression. At the time,and still today, the socialist regime considered art as a way for citizens toarticulate latent criticism of the government.7 In this situation, Lê came toknow young Vietnamese artists who were well-trained as traditional paintersand sculptors and who were able to “make a decent living by creating works
catering to the emerging tourist art market.” While they were both supported
and controlled by the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Association—the only,
and government-run, fine arts organization in the former capital of South
Vietnam—some members also became dedicated to “installation andconceptual art” even though they were “completely disconnected from therest of the world.”8 Having witnessed the suffocating environment in which
local artists were placed, Lê found himself standing in “a position to offersome assistance to [his] local community” with his “connections to aninternational network beyond Vietnam; knowledge of the art scene inAmerica; and English language capability” (“The Pilgrimage” pars. 5–7).
Thus, he decided to organize the nongovernmental artist-run community inthe city.

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

7

As it turned out, it was not easy for Lê to establish a nonprofit
organization in the socialist state. First, he needed financial support to open
a library where local artists could access information from outside Vietnamon contemporary art. He decided to apply to the Rockefeller Foundation andthe Fulbright Program. The Rockefeller Foundation was willing to donate$35,000 for the construction of a library with the condition that Lê set up a
nonprofit recipient organization in Vietnam (as the Rockefeller neverdonates money to individuals), but the socialist government did not approve
the project for fear that promoting new art would contaminate Vietnamese
culture.9 Lê then approached the Fulbright Program office in Vietnam so that
the US organization could serve as the organizational recipient, but thesocialist government still did not approve. These failed attempts brought Lêback to the Los Angeles area, where he could turn to his personalconnections for funding. Among them were Shoshana and Wayne Blank of
Shoshana and Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, Lê’s US art dealers, who
assisted him in setting up the Vietnamese Foundation for the Arts (VNFA) asan American nonprofit that would fund his project in Vietnam. The VNFA
was expected to support educational programs for local artists in Vietnam
and also to construct a gallery space for showcasing their works. This led tothe creation of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City in 2007. The main purpose of
the organization was to help local artists develop a community ofcontemporary art, a field that was highly censored by the socialist
government of Vietnam.
The opening of Sàn Art, however, did not mean that Lê finally andsuccessfully circumvented governmental censorship and supervision in his
effort to establish an art community in Vietnam. As Lê said in a 2010
interview with Zoe Butt, “the government still thinks that [he and hiscolleagues] will poison the Vietnamese youth with [their] Westerncontaminated mind” (“The Pilgrimage” par. 12). The case of Nguyen Thai
Tuan’s solo exhibition Fullness of Absence in 2011 demonstrates the extent
to which Sàn Art is under the government’s control and how freedom of
expression is restricted in Vietnam, where a state license is required for
artists to exhibit their work in public.
In “Red Tape and Digital Talismans,” a careful analysis of thecontemporary art scene in Vietnam under the socialist government, Sàn Art’schief curator Zoe Butt argues that Nguyen attempted in Fullness of Absence
to display the difference between the Vietnams that existed before and after
the socialist integration of 1975. Although Nguyen adopted a surrealist stylereminiscent of the work of Belgian artist René Magritte, with each of his

8TAKASHI ASO

paintings fantastic and imaginary, the Ministry of Culture, Sport, andTourism noticed subtle political nuances that were produced when thepaintings portraying pre- and post-1975 Vietnam were displayed side byside. As a result, the ministry granted his license on the condition that thepre- and post-1975 paintings would not be displayed at the same time in thegallery. Thus, the government censored half of the work that Nguyen had
prepared for the exhibition. Under these circumstances, Sàn Art made aradical decision to exhibit the licensed works in the main gallery and theunauthorized ones in the back gallery, which they called “the stockroom,”
assuming that visitors would know that they were not supposed to go there
and yet expecting that some might wander into the nonpublic space. The
ministry, however, were not fooled by this maneuver. Sàn Art was fined andordered to adhere to the conditions of the license only a week after the
opening of the exhibition. The gallery was also requested to remove all of
the information regarding Fullness of Absence from its bilingual English andVietnamese website.10 According to Butt, this case illustrates how
contemporary art remains “a close third on the official scrutiny list, behindfilm and literature, as the most powerful devices perceived to potentiallydestabilize social harmony” (“Red Tape” 94).11
Still, Lê and Sàn Art were not discouraged and, in the following year, they
initiated Sàn Art Laboratory, a residency program for selected local artists,
who were provided with studio and living space as well as stipends for the
production of new works through individual sessions and workshops withinternational artists, critics, curators, historians, and writers. In this way, Lê,with the help of professionals from the international community, tried tochallenge the local heritage of traditional art and to support promising young
artists in Vietnam. Indeed, the program thus far has been successful andexpands the limits of the freedom of expression under the socialist
government. Though Lê is still not allowed to exhibit his own work, even at
Sàn Art, due to its politically sensitive content, the government has come torecognize the presence of Dinh Q. Lê in the international art community andhas sometimes asked for his opinion on new art. Lê’s commitment to thecontemporary art world outside Vietnam has the potential to bring in new
perspectives and possibly even change the way things are done in thesocialist state.
II. WEAVING ANOTHER MEMORY OF “VIETNAM”
In this section I wish to draw attention to some of Lê’s works in which

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

9

memories of war—the Vietnam War and the Cambodian-Vietnamese War—are interwoven. To put it simply, what is most distinct about Lê’s work isthat he recycles and reuses films and photos that others, including artists andjournalists, have created. For example, in Persistence of Memory and From
Vietnam to Hollywood he applies his photo-weaving technique, in whichinterconnected images produce other possible images of people and war in
Vietnam. These works feature stills from Hollywood movies such as The
Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Platoon (1986), as well as
well-known news photographs such as Eddie Adams’s General Nguyen
Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon (1968) and pre-1975
photographs of nameless individuals and unknown families that the artist
purchased secondhand in Vietnam (fig. 1): all these images are juxtaposed
outside of their original contexts. Lê developed this method when he wasstill an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, having been inspired by the

Figure 1. Dinh Q. Lê, “Russian Roulette” from Persistence of Memory (2002), atapestry work made out of combined images of Michael Chimino’s Russian roulette
scene in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Eddie Adams’s General Nguyen Ngoc Loan
Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon (1968). Courtesy of the artist andElizabeth Leach Gallery.

10

TAKASHI ASO

traditional Vietnamese grass mat weaving technique that he learned from his
aunt in Vietnam when he was young.
In a 2015 interview with Natsumi Araki, chief curator of his exhibition inTokyo, Lê recalled how he developed the photo-weaving idea as a possible
solution to the identity issues that he was facing as a college student:
I started questioning why I should know about somebody else’s history
so much more than my own personal history. I started asking where I
was in relation to all of this as a Vietnamese living in America. It
seemed like everything that made me who I am was a combination ofthese two worlds. I thought that I could make works that talk about thisinterweaving of identity and culture, and how the two are kind of
woven together—and this would, in a way, create a place for me insociety. The word “weaving” kept coming back, and this led me torealize that I could literally start trying to weave these two worlds
together. (35)Indeed, woven together in Lê’s work beyond their original contexts are two
entirely different images of Vietnam, one produced in the United States formoviegoers and readers of news media and the other meant for Vietnamesefamilies before and during the war, with these composite images reflecting
the complex constitution of the identity of Vietnamese refugees in the
United States. In the same interview, Lê clarified the point that he is trying
to make when using images from Hollywood films:
The Vietnamese in [Hollywood war] movies are kind of like props: weare the shadows in the jungle; the prostitutes or the farmers who don’t
say anything. We have never been real characters. This is what led me
to take images from Hollywood films and kind of break them up, andthen insert—through my weaving technique—images that I thought had
been left out. (35)As a result, in Lê’s works, we are expected to recover the lost images andunknown stories of Vietnamese people during the war. At the same time, weare ceaselessly reminded that true images and real facts about people inVietnam during wartime no longer exist and thus are out of reach. As Viet
Thanh Nguyen rightly points out in “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet
Nam,” Lê is seeking to “redress the absences [of all those dead and missing
people in Vietnam] in both American and Asian American memories andETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

11

stories” and, at the same time, hinting at “the existence of the Vietnamese inthese memories and stories as they hover phantasmatically between being
faceless names or nameless faces” (23).
Lê is not, therefore, excavating some historical truth hidden beneathcultural and political mistreatment, either on the American or theVietnamese side. He is simulating and reenacting memories of war, part ofwhich are already familiar to the American public through popular or news
media. In the course of his doing this, Lê reproduces and reprocesses images
and memories so that they are reaccumulated in viewers’ minds as anotherimage and another memory of “Vietnam.”Lê discloses the way in which he emphasizes a “Vietnamese” perspective
in his work in an interview with Stefano Catalani, curator of A Tapestry ofMemories, a 2007 exhibition at Bellevue Arts Museum in the state ofWashington:
I’m really a collagist. I think a lot of people may not realize that. But
that’s who I am. I just weave the photographs instead of composing
them in a collage. It’s more craft-oriented. And yet it’s all about taking
diverse information, or even focused information in a certain area, andcombining it to speak about things that I want to say. I’m taking theinformation and putting it in a different way to present my point of view
because I feel the information out there doesn’t speak to and of myexperience. At first it was just this idea that the Vietnamese experience
was not presented in the American history books, and I felt this need to
put the Vietnamese experience out there, by taking all the same
information but presenting it in a different way, from a Vietnamesepoint of view. (53)The point here is that Lê—not a historian but a “collagist”—does not bringin any single piece of new information on the history of the war in Vietnam.
Instead, he restructures the information that people already know so that thesame history or story can be reinterpreted and thus reevaluated from anotherpoint of view, one that is “Vietnamese,” to use Lê’s word, or as I would say,
“Vietnamese American.” Thus, with images and stories of the war
juxtaposed differently than before, Lê draws attention to the difference
created when the same content is applied in another context, or, in otherwords, the difference between the image that we can find in the original andanother that has been simulated and reenacted in his work. This difference
leads to another possible history of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese

12

TAKASHI ASO

people, and in this process, another image and another memory of“Vietnam” are created in viewers’ minds.
Are the new images of Vietnam that Lê has created, then, more authentic
and justifiable than popular and stereotyped images already imprinted in our
minds? Do new memories, which the artist asks us to recollect, reflect
experiences of Vietnamese Americans more accurately? What we see in Lê’s
work is difference, that is, the difference in perception between images in theoriginal contexts and those in his works. This is why the artist denies thepresence of any particular, let alone political, messages in his work, while
his strategy of bipolarizing the two different images of Vietnam appears to
be radically political.12 At stake is a new perspective, which Lê emphasizes
to us. How, then, can Lê possibly justify the authenticity of this new
perspective in his work? Is it not just another point of view reflecting theartist’s idiosyncratic ideas? In the following sections, I explore theconception of Vietnam that Lê repeatedly produces in his works and discuss
whether the artist can justify this view and, if so, how.
III.

“EVERYTHING IS A RE-ENACTMENT”

In the previous section, I focused on Lê’s photo-weaving works—
Persistence of Memory and From Vietnam to Hollywood—in which he draws
attention to the invisible presence of Vietnamese refugees in American
culture as offering another perspective from which to reflect on not only thesituation of Vietnamese people now living in the United States but also on
the Vietnam War. Although this approach might appear to reflect theessentialist position of the artist and also support the idea that theexperiences of Vietnamese Americans, whether in the war or otherwise, canbe articulated by Vietnamese Americans only, Lê also expands the idea ofVietnam to include Japanese reactions to the Vietnam War in Everything Is a
Re-Enactment, a new work that he video shot for the 2015 exhibition at theMori Art Museum in Tokyo. In the video, he depicts the life of Nakaura
Yoichi, a forty-year-old Japanese bartender who wears military gear from
North Vietnam, wartime Japan, and the United States for reenactment
events.
Lê initially encountered Nakaura at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on August
15, 2014, the memorial day representing the end of the Pacific War in Japan,
when between 150,000 and 200,000 individuals gathered to honor and pray
for the war dead who are buried there. Visitors include not only politicians,
war veterans, and families of the war victims, but also nationalists,

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

13

militarists, and left-wing protesters. Curiously, as if taking part in a“cosplay” event, some visitors wear military costumes from imperial
Japan.13 Because he was interested in political controversies over whether
politicians, particularly cabinet members, should visit Yasukuni, where the Aclass war criminals of World War II are buried, Lê went to Yasukuni anddiscovered Nakaura, who “sort of stood out” among the visitors wearing
military costumes (Interview by Araki 37). During a brief conversation with
Lê, Nakaura revealed that he was involved with a group of people who
simulated and reenacted battles from the Vietnam War at the foot of Mount
Fuji using fake guns and wearing military uniforms of the United States, theVietnamese Rangers, and the Viet Cong.14 This drew Lê’s attention to suchan extent that he was inspired to make a film about the reenactments. Even
though Lê never satisfied his desire to shoot reenactment scenes because of
the group members’ reluctance to participate in the film, he successfully
captured Nakaura’s fetishistic desire for military uniforms as well as his
everyday life as a bartender in his video Everything Is a Re-Enactment.
The video consists of three parts shot in three locations. In the opening
part, we see Nakaura wearing North Vietnamese military gear simulating acombat exercise in a grassy field. In the next part, he changes into US Armyand Japanese Imperial Army military uniforms in his apartment (fig. 2). Thisis followed by a third scene in which Nakaura is at work as a bartender. This
scene also includes Nakaura in his Vietnamese military uniform singing
karaoke at the bar. In addition to the video, real US, Vietnamese, andJapanese military uniforms are on display in the museum (fig 3).15 Even
though Japan’s Self-Defense Forces never fought in the Vietnam War
because the postwar constitution forbids the use of armed forces other thanto protect the nation from foreign invasion, groups of Japanese people areinterested in reenacting battles from the Vietnam War. Nakaura is among
them; for him and other members of such groups, “reenactments are [their]
attempt to understand the past” (Dinh Q. Lê: Memory for Tomorrow 118). As
the artist has stated, “in a way . . . what Nakaura-san is doing mirrors myown practice, where I go through the art to learn about all aspects of theVietnam War, and different perspectives to give me a fuller picture of it”(qtd. in Wee par. 11).
The Japanese bartender brings forth, through his military reenactments, anopportunity for the Vietnamese American artist to once again reflect on themeaning of the Vietnam War. This, however, is not to say that Lê either
identifies or sympathizes with Nakaura, and in fact he does neither. WhileLê is quite vigilant of what he is doing in his work, which is why we are

14

TAKASHI ASO

Figure 2. Dinh Q. Lê, Everything Is a Re-Enactment (2015). Japanesebartender Nakaura Yoichi poses in Imperial Japanese military gear for thecamera in his apartment. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3. Dinh Q. Lê, Everything Is a Re-Enactment (2015). Nakaura sings
karaoke in his Vietnamese military uniform at the bar. Courtesy of the artist.

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

15

always asked to be aware of “the lens of our time” through which Lê
simulates the events he depicts in his work, Nakaura and other members of
his reenactment group “really believe they’re doing something genuinely”(Personal interview). For example, they go through “the trouble of doing
serious research on the food they’re supposed to eat that would reflect thetimes, the books, music, everything” during the Vietnam War (qtd. in Weepar. 12) so that they would “get to the real thing” (Personal interview). In
Everything Is a Re-Enactment, Lê emphasizes “the structure [Nakaura] isgoing through,” noting that “he is running, he is talking and he is trying tounderstand,” but in the end “he comes back to the bar” and sings aVietnamese song—translated into Japanese—in karaoke, which is part of thereenactment. Although these events are a reenactment and thus not real,
Nakaura and his friends are “fascinated” with the process of copying andreenacting (Personal interview). It is this system of simple belief, a sort ofFreudian “repetition compulsion,” that Lê draws attention to in his work.
It is important to note at this point that people, not just Nakaura, but also
others including Lê, do not perform reenactments simply to transport
themselves to the time and place where things originally occurred. Rather,
they reenact in order to experience a traumatic event all over again and thus
relive what they are supposed to have repressed and yet are still trying toremember. As Freud argued in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we are“obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience
instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past” (18).
Thus, in Nakaura’s case, he simulates battles from the Vietnam War, notonly because he wants to identify with a Vietnamese Ranger or a Viet Cong
soldier but in order to retrieve something that he and other Japanese people
have repressed and left behind in the history of postwar Japan. To be more
specific, Nakaura tries to recover an alternative history of World War II forJapan as he reenacts Vietnamese resistance to the American troops. At one
point in the video, Nakaura says, “I believe Vietnam won because Japan lost.
Japan’s defeat was a lesson” (Dinh Q. Lê: Memory for Tomorrow 119).
Historians might find this interpretation problematic, but Lê regards a
person like Nakaura as “a symptom of [contemporary] Japan” that is theresult of “the lack of open discussion about the country’s actions during
World War II” (Maerkle par. 20). As Lê rightly points out, “here issomebody who is very curious about Japan’s World War II history but has
found it difficult to find places where people are willing to talk about it
openly and in a balanced way” (qtd. in Qin par. 11).
Most Japanese people today assume that their fellow citizens are

16

TAKASHI ASO

antimilitary and peace loving, and thus, they are reluctant to face theimperialist and military actions that Japan undertook in the past, such as theannexation of Korea or the Manchurian Incident, let alone the attempt toestablish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which included theoccupation of Vietnam. Still, a small number of people are curious to know
more about Japan’s military past. Isolated from the antimilitary, peaceloving general public, they seek to understand Japanese military actions
during World War II and to search for the reason why imperial Japanultimately surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.
The lack of public space wherein open discussion about Japan’s military
past is possible leads Nakaura, and people like him, to adopt a “twisted andsurreal” point of view in which Japan’s real past is obscured and most likely
distorted, while facts about the Vietnam War, for example, aremischaracterized and misunderstood through their reenactments. In thissense, Nakaura’s “obsession with war and his seriousness in learning aboutit” are by-products of Japan’s repression of the topic of its wartime past
(Maerkle par. 20), and his reenactment practices reflect negatively on thenation’s “political unconscious,” a hidden and/or latent desire to rewrite thepast in a way that would allow Japanese to look back on a beautiful history.
The point is that the general public does not necessarily wish to forget thepast, but they sometimes forget part of the past willingly and other times
unwillingly—intentional amnesia or what Bernard Weiner calls “motivatedforgetting”—in order to reconstruct a better past (Weiner esp. 218–19).
History, as such, has to be acceptable by both the citizens and the state. It is
not just important for government officials and right-wing politicians but
also for the public at large, including left-wing protestors of war shrine
visits, that history be beautiful and without flaw so that stories of goodnational citizens can be safely passed on to the next generation, even when
the facts do not support such narratives.16
A person such as Nakaura, therefore, is not an eccentric exception in
Japanese society but, rather, an ordinary person, even though his fetishistic
desire for military uniforms and his obsessive practices of militaryreenactment may appear erratic and idiosyncratic to many. Indeed, he may
be a little outlandish given that he “sort of stood out” to the Vietnamese
American artist at Yasukuni. Yet he is doing what many people do:reenacting in one way or another so as to render the past—or stories of thepast—more comfortable. For Nakaura, reenacting Vietnam War battles is theway to achieve this goal. He is just not entirely aware that the reenactments
may be part of an intentional amnesia that rewrites Japanese history. It is thisETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

17

structure of partial forgetting and recreating that Lê captures and reenacts inEverything Is a Re-Enactment.
MAPPING OUT THE IDEA OF VIETNAM
IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYIV.

As Amy Qin reports in the New York Times, Lê is now expanding his
world beyond Vietnam to include Japan and also small islands in thesouthern Pacific. His latest video, The Colony, released in 2016 at Ikon
Gallery in Birmingham, England, is set in the Chincha Islands off thesouthwest coast of Peru, where imperial powers, including the UnitedStates, fought in the mid-nineteenth century over guano, the excrement ofseabirds that is a powerful fertilizer (fig. 4).17 This, however, does not meanthat he is turning away from the topic of Vietnam. In fact, given that
Everything Is a Re-Enactment raises the question of how the socialist state is
being misperceived and stereotyped by a particular group of Japanesepeople, The Colony emphasizes another image of Vietnam. While his latest
work appears to represent the remnants of nineteenth-century EuroAmerican hegemony over some small islands in the Pacific Ocean, viewers
actually face the contemporary problem of power struggles between China
and Vietnam with US support over territories and natural resources in theSouth China Sea. Lê is situating the question of Vietnam in the broader
framework of the Pacific as well as in a broader context of world politics.
The Colony has three screens and projectors, one large and two small. On
the larger screen are projected shots taken by a drone over the islands where
workers are collecting and packing droppings of seabirds. On the smaller
screens, laid flat on the floor, are footage of Chinese vessels crashing into
Vietnamese fishing boats in the South China Sea and footage of a US
military airplane patrolling over Chinese activities, military and otherwise,in the same sea lane, both of which the artist “found online” (“The Toll of
Human Desire” 26). In the early twentieth-first century, as a new balance ofpolitical and military power is being established in the Asia-Pacific region,
Vietnam’s weak position in international politics is renewed in the middle ofthe conflict between the two superpowers, China and the United States.
Socialist Vietnam is relying on the United States to protect its territories andnatural resources forty years after the fall of Saigon. Though a British
reviewer of the work contends that Lê’s “mixing of [two different] stories is
not entirely successful” and that “it needs more focus” (Searle pars. 10, 13),
I find that the artist brings to the fore another possible point of view from

18

TAKASHI ASO

Figure 4. Dinh Q. Lê, The Colony (2015). Workers collect and pack guano(excrement of seabirds) on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Courtesy of theartist.

which to see the question of, to use Lê’s own words, “a big power grab”(“The Toll of Human Desire” 25). As the artist asserts in the interview about
this work, the background noise of the surveillance video, which disrupts“the main narrative of the Guano War,” reminds viewers that the past andthe present are interwoven. Lê states, “I want to talk about empire building
and its collapse, I want to talk about this process as a human toll” (29). As
another instance of “everything is a re-enactment,” The Colony expands ourperspective to see the location of Vietnam in the early twenty-first century inthe context of global politics, as well as in the world of installation art.
Everything Is a Re-Enactment and The Colony thus both illuminate aspace where we can update the idea of Vietnam in the broader context of thetranspacific. Nakaura’s reenactment activities not only distort andmisrepresent the reality of the Vietnam War, but they also broaden ourperspective of it to show the aftereffects of one of the most tragic events inthe second half of the twentieth century. Even though we should question thereality of the Vietnam War that Nakaura misrepresents, his reenactment,

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

19

itself being nothing but real, should be taken seriously as a cultural andpolitical by-product of that war, which negatively reflects on contemporary
Japanese people’s reactions, or nonreactions, to the atrocities committed bytheir military during World War II. Similarly, The Colony is a work in which
viewers are asked to face the renewed question of US hegemony in broader
areas of the Pacific region from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, as
well as the problem of China’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea
today. In these works, we no longer witness the bipolarization that Lê
depicts in his earlier works in which America’s imperialist view of theVietnam War and its aftermath is polemically reviewed from the Vietnamese
American perspective. The artist goes one step further in Everything Is a ReEnactment and The Colony to demonstrate the relativist position in which
history can be seen from a number of different perspectives if situated in a
broad context. After having proposed in early works a counternarrative tothe mainstream American view of the Vietnam War, and thereby
contributing to the rectification of American prejudices against Vietnam andVietnamese people, Lê is now trying to incorporate multilateral perspectives
from which to see and update the idea of Vietnam wherein he himself isincluded.
What Lê challenges in these latest videos is, then, our assumption that theformation of culture is closely related to the constitution of a given nationstate and also to the uniqueness of its national culture. For the last few
decades, artists and scholars in the field of Asian American studies haveworked hard to distinguish their respective racial-ethnic positions. In doing
so, they have unwittingly intensified the dominance of US mainstream
culture, as they draw a contrast between the dominant culture and minority
ones and then apply to their analysis of the formation of local ethnic cultures“theories” that can be traced back to Euro-American sources. Lê, I argue,
should be counted among such artists, at least at the early stage of his careerwhen he simulated and reenacted images from major American films andphotojournalism within a framework of Euro-American digital art, evenwhen applying the unique technique of photo-weaving. His latest videos,
however, released in Tokyo and Birmingham, point to a new direction inwhich the bipolar relationship between mainstream and minority cultures iscritically reviewed. The idea of Vietnam is relocated in the broader
framework of the transpacific and thus represented from multiple points ofview. This, I suppose, has resulted mainly from his “re-turn” to Vietnam. In
Ho Chi Minh City where Lê initiated educational programs for local artistsat Sàn Art, he has been re-educated to broaden his ideas and see US-

20

TAKASHI ASO

Vietnamese relations within a broader transpacific perspective.
This is why Lê replaces the bipolar confrontation of American narratives,
always quite visible, and Vietnamese ones, sometimes hardly visible, of his
early works with multilateral languages of the transpacific about thepresence of Vietnam in his new videos. To put it differently, if Lê was trying
to recover the lost Vietnamese presence in his early artistic career, he is now
producing works from which people can access fragments of a larger reality,
part of which is Vietnam. These fragments are scattered around, neverrevealing a whole, and thus, Lê may appear to need “more focus.” In fact,
this is the way in which Lê demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of
our reality wherein a number of different perspectives collide.
These perspectives not only challenge our stereotyped images of Vietnam
but also expand our view of the world beyond the binary oppositions of theUnited States and Vietnam, democracy and socialism, and war and peace.
NOTES
This research has been conducted with financial support from the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Researchnumber 15K02362. I also deeply appreciate that Dinh Q. Lê made the timeto see me in the former capital of the Republic of Vietnam on Christmas
Day, 2015. Our discussions on the topics of his works, Sàn Art, andmemories of war have motivated me to undertake this project.
1
Dinh Q. Lê: Memory for Tomorrow was held at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, July 25–
October 12, 2015. Afterward, most of the exhibit was relocated to Hiroshima where anotherexhibition with the same title was held March 19–May 15, 2016, at the Hiroshima City
Museum of Contemporary Art.
2
One may wonder why the Vietnamese government censored something showing theeffects of Agent Orange. According to Lê, the socialist government “was not sure how tohandle the issue of Agent Orange/birth defects and soil contamination,” when he worked on
Damaged Genes in 1998. Because Vietnam was an agricultural country and largely
dependent on agricultural exports, the government was afraid that “the news of soil
contamination with dioxin,” caused by Agent Orange, would negatively “affect its
agricultural exports.” Also, just a few years after the US-Vietnamese normalization of
diplomatic relations, Vietnam was still under US trade sanctions. So, the Vietnamese
government did not want to criticize America openly. For these reasons, art exhibitions, press
releases, and even scientific research on Agent Orange to publicize its aftereffects on humanbodies and in the soil, were prohibited in Vietnam (Lê, Message to the author, 6 Dec. 2016).
3
Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time to do research for “Vietnam War photographs byVietnamese journalists working for the North Vietnamese government,” as he writes to Moira
Roth in 2015 (qtd. in Roth 138).
4
As someone who has compiled autobiographical writings of Vietnamese refugee students
in her classroom, Sucheng Chang defines one-and-a-half generation Vietnamese Americans

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

21

as “immigrants who come at a young age who retain their ability to speak, if not always toread and write, the ancestral language as well as Asian values and norms. . . . They mediate
not only between different generations in their families, but between American and
Vietnamese ways of life and thought as well” (xiv).
5
Tiffany Chung is another Viet Kieu artist who is now based in Ho Chi Minh City. Having
emigrated with her family to the United States after the Vietnam War, Chung was educated on
the West Coast and then returned back to Vietnam in 2000 where she is quite active as amultimedia artist. She exhibits her works across the world: for example, she presented an
installation titled “between the blank spaces of Hitachi Factories I read poetry interwoven
with tales of the barbarians, famines and war sacrifices” at Kenpoku Art 2016, held in Ibaraki
Prefecture, Japan, September 17–November 20 2016. See https://kenpoku-art.jp/en/artists/
tiffany-chung/.
6
Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt (2003), is counted among those who are mostreluctant to travel back to Vietnam, for she is still unable “to forgive and to forget.” Shedescribes it as “corruption; greed; lust for power; domination replacing freedom as a guiding
principle and goal; brothers fighting brothers; mothers giving birth to children who grow up
to kill one another” (par. 14).
7
Another censored and controlled area is education, even though deregulation has been
rapidly facilitated so the nation can catch up with the international community, particularly inbusiness and computer technology. Instructors from outside of Vietnam, however, still must
accept certain restrictions on what they can teach. Typically, they are allowed to teach all thetechniques that people in Vietnam must know to compete in the global marketplace, while
they are forbidden to discuss and evaluate the technological content, which the government
fears might lead to criticism of the status quo.
8
Lê asserts that “the government was very watchful of southerners” in the early twentiethfirst century: “After all, the south was on the wrong side of the war. The artists were scared
stiff of the cultural police, which is why the southern artists at the time did not organize
themselves to create an alternative scene. They were fearful of being accused of being
subversive by the government and didn’t want to end up in jail” (“The Pilgrimage” par. 6).
9
Paradoxically, the Vietnamese government also requested a significant amount of money
for the creation of the library. In other words, the government required a cut of the donation(Lê, Personal interview).
10
The websites are restored today, as the server is “based in the USA” (Butt, Message to theauthor).
11
The story of the French Vietnamese film director Trần Anh Hùng is a famous one: he wasallowed to shoot his second film Cyclo (1995) in his homeland after the international successof The Scent of Green Papaya (1993); yet, the government did not authorize the release of
Cyclo in Vietnam because it was considered to be antisocial and thus antigovernment. See
Barnes “Cinema as Cultural Translation” for an analysis of the significance of Cyclo as atranscultural production.
12
In the interview with Araki, Lê argues that “I don’t think I insert a message in my work.”
At the same time, he acknowledges that “through research, interviews, and talking to thepeople involved, certain kinds of issues emerge”: “Rather than putting messages in the work,
I present issues that people present themselves, through their voices or my research—and
they then become part of my work” (38).
13“Cosplay” is a coined Japanese slang word derived from “costume” and “play” used in
popular and street culture. Most typically, “cosplayers” wear costumes and accessories tolook like specific characters in animation videos and comic books. They also imitate
historical people and groups, as in the case of Yasukuni visitors.
14
Reenactments of historical battles are quite popular in both the United States and Japan:

22

TAKASHI ASO

groups of people regularly gather together for reenactments of battles of the Civil War, WorldWar II, and the Vietnam War, for example. For more information about Japanese reenactmentgroups of the Vietnam War, see, e.g., the following websites: Ho Chi Minn Trail Hiking Club(sic), http://www.geocities.jp/hthc1968/, and Mickey Mouse Club, http://mickeymouseclub.
ifdef.jp/html/mmc_top.htm.
15
The uniforms were borrowed from Nakaura for the exhibit at the Mori Art Museum, and,according to Lê, the Japanese said that they are “original” (Lê, Message to the author, 18
May 2016).
16
A typical example is the popular TV drama Oshin, which was broadcast by Nippon Hoso
Kyoukai (Japan Broadcasting Cooperation) in Japan from 1983 to 1984 and then in othercountries, including the United States and part of Europe and also China, Indonesia, andother Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Produced by a semi-national TV station, Oshin
spread the image of Japan as a victimized heroine, while underplaying its military imperialist
side. See Suzuki for a critical reading of the drama (esp. 131–39).
17
Exhibitions of The Colony were also held at Artangel in London, August 25–October 9,
2016, and Site Gallery in Sheffield, September 3–December 3, 2016.

WORKS CITED
Barnes, Leslie. “Cinema as Cultural Translation: The Production of Vietnam in Trần AnhHùng’s Cyclo.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (2010), pp. 106–28.
Butt, Zoe. “Locating Dinh Q. Lê.” Dinh Q. Lê: Memory for Tomorrow, pp. 126–30.
—. Message to the author. 20 Mar. 2016. E-mail.
—. “Red Tape and Digital Talismans: Shaping Knowledge beneath Surveillance.” Art in
the Asia-Pacific: Intimate Publics, edited by Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King, and Mami
Kataoka, Routledge, 2014, pp. 91–104.
Chang, Sucheng. The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution,
Flight and New Beginnings. Temple UP, 2006.
Dinh Q. Lê: The Colony. Ikon Gallery, 2016.
Dinh Q. Lê: Memory for Tomorrow. Heibon-sha, 2015.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. The Standard Editionof Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. Vol. 18.
Hogarth P, 1950, pp. 1–64.
Lê, Dinh Q. Interview by Araki Natsumi. “Interview with Dinh Q. Lê.” Dinh Q. Lê: Memory
for Tomorrow, pp. 34–38.
—. Message to the author. 18 May 2016. E-mail.
—. Message to the author. 6 Dec. 2016. E-mail.
—. Stefano Catalani. “Interview with Dinh Q. Lê.” A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Din
Q. Lê. Bellevue Arts Museum, 2007, pp. 51–72.
—. Interview by Zoe Butt. “The Pilgrimage of Inspiration: Artists as Engineers in
Vietnam.” Dispatch. 16 Apr. 2010, http://curatorsintl.org/images/assets/Dinh_Q_Le.pdf.
Accessed 25 Feb. 2016.
—. Interview by Zoe Butt. “The Toll of Human Desire: Zoe Butt in Conversation with
Dinh Q. Lê.” Dinh Q. Lê: The Colony, pp. 25–29.
—. Personal interview. 25 Dec. 2016.
Lenz, Günter H. “Toward a Politics of American Transculutral Studies: Discourse of
Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism.” Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American
Studies, edited by Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, DartmouthCollege P, 2011, pp. 391–425.
Maerkle, Andrew. “Dinh Q. Lê: Simply Unforgettable.” ART iT. 14 Sept. 2015, http://www.

ETHICS OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

23

art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_itv_e/tQG3JXuUvnpRlbyz0OfH/?lang=en. Accessed 1 Mar.
2016.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics ofMinority Discourse.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (2006), pp. 7–37.
Qin, Amy. “The Artist Dinh Q. Lê Expands His Gaze to Worlds Beyond Vietnam.” New YorkTimes. 1 Oct. 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/arts/international/theartistdinh-q-le-expands-his-gaze-to-worlds-beyond-vietnam.html?_r=0. Accessed 25
Feb. 2016.
Roth, Moira. “Of Vietnam & America: The Life, Art & Memories of Dinh Q. Lê.” Dinh Q.
Lê: Memory for Tomorrow, pp. 136–40.
Searle, Adrian. “Dinh Q. Lê: The Colony review—a messy meditation on the Pacific guano
trade.” Guardian. 2 Feb. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/02/
dinh-q-le-the-colony-review-rich-messy-melange-history-technology. Accessed 11 Mar.
2016.
Suzuki, Tessa-Morris. Re-Inventing Japan: Nation, Culture, Identity. M. E. Sharpe, 1998.
Truong, Monique. “Vietnam: Into Thin Air.” Times Asian Journey. 18 Aug. 2003, http://www.
monique-truong.com/essays/downloads/Into-Thin-Air.pdf. Accessed 25 Feb. 2016.
Wee, Darryl. “Dinh Q. Lê’s ‘Memory for Tomorrow’ at the Mori Art Museum.” Blouin
Artinfo International. 24 Aug. 2015, http://enjp.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1220747/
dinh-q-les-memory-for-tomorrow-at-the-mori-art-museum. Accessed 2 Mar. 2016.
Weiner, Bernard. “Motivated forgetting and the study of repression.” Journal of Personality,
vol. 36, no. 2 (1968), pp. 213–34.