Dinh Q. Lê (born 1968; Vietnamese name: Lê Quang Đỉnh) is a Vietnamese American multimedia artist, best known for his photography work and photo-weaving technique. Many of his works consider the Vietnam War as well as methods of memory and how it connects to the present. Other series of his, such as his From Hollywood to Vietnam, explore the relation of pop culture to personal memory and the difference between history and its portrayals in media. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal described him as "one of the world's most visible Vietnamese contemporary artists".

Life and education
Lê was born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodia border. The Cambodian-Vietnamese War of the 1970s brought Khmer Rouge troops to the region. When he was ten, in 1978, his family escaped. When the journey began, Lê was accompanied by his six siblings and his mother. However, while the ten year-old Lê made it safely onto the boat along with his mother, his other siblings did not. In an interview published in a catalogue for one of his exhibitions, he recalled the story of the escape. It was a "desperate run for freedom," and he said that he "[would] never forget the look on his mother's face as she scoured the beach...for signs of her eldest sons and daughter". After a year-long stay in Thailand, the family eventually moved across the ocean and settled in Los Angeles. 

After Lê received BFA degree in photography from University of California, Santa Barbara, he began his own career as an artist. He began to weave photos, inspired by the grass-mat weaving lessons he had from his aunt when he was a child. He earned his MFA degree from The School of Visual Arts in New York. By 2005, he was living primarily in Ho Chi Minh City, though he did not exhibit there due to the requirement to apply for a government permit.

Lê is also a collector of Vietnamese art and antiques.

Art career

Much of Lê's work explores "the narrative of loss" and the traumas of war.

In his early work, by weaving strips of photos together using a planting procedure, Lê created large-scale photographic montages. He stated that it was inspired by his aunt's technique of weaving mats out of grass.  In this technique, images are layered in a repetition of patterning with glossy tapestries made entirely out of type C prints. Linen tape is used to finish the edges. Reviewing a show of these works in 1998, "The Headless Buddha," Claudine Ise of Los Angeles Times described it as "mind-blowing" and "amazingly intricate".

In 1999, Lê had his first major success with "Mot Coi Di Ve," a work in which he interwove thousands of photographs into a quilt. He took the title of the work from a popular Vietnamese song, "Spending One's Life Trying to Return Home". By 2014, the New York Times was reporting that Lê's collages were selling for $50,000 to $60,000 apiece. 

In 2005, a small exhibition of Lê's photographic collages was shown by the Asia Society. Art critic Ken Johnson of the New York Times gave the exhibition a mixed review, stating that some works had "an affecting emotional urgency," but also criticizing what he saw as Lê's "susceptibility to overly literal or obvious ideas."

In 2007, Lê co-founded the non-profit art space Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City) along with Tiffany Chung and Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Phunam Thuc Ha of The Propeller Group. In 2018, he curated Guerilla Tactics, a solo show of contemporary ceramics by the artist Nguyen Quoc Chanh at MoT+++ in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Video installations
The New York Museum of Modern Art exhibited Lê's video exhibition "The Farmers and the Helicopters" in 2010, a three-channel video of Vietnam War scenes and interviews with Vietnamese people. It also included a working helicopter built from scratch by Lê and a friend.  Holland Cotter of The New York Times noted that it appeared to be the museum's most popular exhibit when he visited, and described it as "a visually tight and ideologically porous weave of fact and fiction, memory and illusion, with the elements of each pair in constant, volatile interchange." The installation was acquired for MoMA's permanent collection.

Another of Lê's video exhibitions, "Light and Belief" (2012), juxtaposed watercolors by Vietnamese artists during the Vietnam War with interviews that Lê conducted with them. "Light and Belief" was exhibited at Documenta (a quinquennial exhibition in Kassel, Germany) in 2012 and again at the Asia Society in 2017.

In 2015, his video installations were the subject of a retrospective at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. It was his first large-scale museum show in Asia, and the first time the museum had given a large solo show to an artist from Southeast Asia.

Awards
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography 1994
The Dupont Fellowship in 1994
The Aaron Siskind Fellowship in 1992
The Prince Claus Fund Award in 2010

References

External links

Sàn Art 
Dinh Q. Lê at Kadist Art Foundation
Contemplating the Headless Buddha: The Photographic Work of Dinh Q. Lê on BuddhistDoor Global 
Dinh Q. Lê in Conversation with Zoe Butt on the Guggenheim website. 

Vietnamese emigrants to the United States
1968 births
Living people
School of Visual Arts alumni
Vietnamese photographers