Dinh Q. Lê Erasure

Dinh Q. Lê Erasure –

Contents –

Dinh Q. Lê Erasure – A multimedia installation and online archive erasurearchive.net –

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 8 July – 10 September 2011 –

6 Preface – Gene Sherman

– 12 An interview

with Dinh Q. Lê – Dolla S. Merrillees

– 24 Archiving fear in the struggle against forgetfulness – Zoe Butt –

72 Artist selected biography – – 73

Artist selected bibliography – – 76 Contributors

– – 78 Acknowledgements

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Overleaf Erasure (still), 2011 Single-channel, 2K HD colour video with sound (7 mins) Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Courtesy the artist

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– Preface Gene Sherman Chairman and Executive Director Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation –

– The Sherman family’s arrival in Australia followed close on the heels of the American capitulation in Vietnam in 1975. In our homeland of South Africa, and indeed in London, where my husband Brian and I had lived in the early seventies, Vietnam seemed far away. The Far East didn’t figure significantly on our list of preoccupations at that time.

Apartheid and its shock-provoking divide, conquer and obliterate tactics overrode all other concerns. How to respond to the brutal system? Remain and be silent, protest and attract retribution, leave and seek guilt-free opportunities in a world with higher ideals? These were the issues we struggled with, as did almost all of our family members, friends and colleagues.

Our arrival in Sydney saw the family’s preoccupation turn to practical matters. Where to live, how to live, in this superficially familiar but surprisingly foreign sunny country? A half-decade stint in Sydney University’s slowly diminishing French Department followed by roughly five years of finetuning my own opinions and responses brought me face to face with the reality of Australia’s geographic position in the midst of the Asia-Pacific region. Our Eurocentric perspective was transformed: Down Under suddenly felt like the centrepiece of a new global mapping; the place to be, perhaps, as the twentieth century moved through its final quarter.

During its twenty-one years as a large, active commercial gallery Sherman Galleries focused deliberately on the artists of our region. Asian-Australian practitioners, Australian artists, Asians born and based variously in Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore featured prominently in the programme. SouthEast Asia was relatively neglected in the commercial gallery’s represented group. Exhibition schedules were tight even during the thirteen years when the gallery operated out of two Paddington spaces and mounted up to twenty-two exhibitions per year. Vietnam was unknown territory. Its time would come.

When the gallery transformed into a long-planned Foundation in 2008, the not-for-profit organisation retained significant aspects of the commercial endeavour’s vision. Outreach to Asia has continued to grow. Recently imprisoned Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei (arrested at Beijing Airport on 3 April 2011), Japanese star architectural duo SANAA, filmmakers from Asia and the Middle East, serious artworks by well-known Asia-Pacific practitioners commissioned specifically for children, and fruitful and stimulating partnerships with museums and others1 have provided Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) audiences and staff opportunities to expand their horizons and deepen their knowledge of the neighbourhood in which they work and live.

In 1993 the first Brisbane-based Asia Pacific Triennial included a work by Vietnamese artist Nguyen Xuân Tifp, which was subsequently acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery. The Triennial was a watershed exhibition – expansive, inclusive of the wider Asian

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– region and, for me, as for many curators, writers, gallerists and museum directors, compellingly original in its geographical scope and originality of vision. Our region was in the limelight for once and our artists’ work felt aesthetically and intellectually original.

I first became aware of Dinh Q. Lê’s work at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Communist Vietnam had clearly produced artists of note and serious creative voices were seeping through bureaucratic and ideological barriers.

In the ensuing years Dinh’s work continued to appear in catalogue images and the global biennales and triennales whose mega exhibitions I regularly attended: the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2005; the Gwangju Biennale, Korea, 2006; the 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 2006; Thermoclime of Art, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2007; the Singapore Biennale, 2008; as well as shows at 10 Chancery Lane in Hong Kong, an active commercial gallery that corepresented a number of Sherman Galleries artists. However, my contact with Dinh’s work was for the most part limited to published images and accompanying text. Nevertheless, awareness of his rising status and presence in significant international events slowly grew. The woven works, tapestries of Hollywood representations of his motherland and richly authentic local images, interlocked via basket-weaving techniques, both intrigued and distanced me. I found the visual panoramas a tad overwhelming. The images seemed to clash loudly, spawning later memories of chaotic iconography. My sensibility craved a quieter approach.

South-East Asia at last came into focus with a family expedition to Vietnam in early 2010.

Typical tourist activities don’t generally interest me.

Crowds spoil my experience and encounters with faceless monuments leave me unsatisfied. I like contact with locals, especially but not exclusively those whose interests intersect with mine. I also gain much from both fiction and non-fiction by local or expatriate writers.

How to manage two weeks in Vietnam, traversing from North to South, given the needs described above?

Brian and I started at the famous Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, noting the company we kept in selecting this 1901 historical building as our point de départ. Earlier guests had included Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Charlie Chaplin, Jane Fonda and Susan Sontag.2 Via the hotel concierge we deployed and then temporarily employed a staff member whose husband was an artist, and through her we saw engaging work and met a few of the small group of artists practising outside the parameters of the lucrative tourism circuit.

Onwards and southwards we travelled to mid-country Da Nang.

We visited the War Museum’s absorbing and amazing representations of triumphant Viet Cong soldiers and the real life broken bodies of captured American helicopters. Not far from this notorious border and battle zone we stayed in a tiny artists’ colony-cum-hotel. Owned by a Vietnamese

– woman married to a Frenchman, the five or so villas were individually decorated by her and she created or collected all the artworks in the complex. Long-into-the-night conversations with Australian curator and gallerist Tony Oliver, accompanied by delicious vegetarian food prepared specifically for us, advanced our understanding of culture and place. Tony had settled in the area with his Vietnamese wife and son, and it was their warm invitation and irreproachable guidance that took us to the heart of this contested country.

Finally, and as if an invisible hand were moving us toward a critical destination, we arrived in Saigon and, as planned, visited Sàn Art, the gallery space set up in 2007 by a small group of artists, encouraged by and including returned Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê. Our eyes were opened in a fundamental way as Dinh, fellow artist Richard Streitmatter-Tran and Sàn Art Co-Director and Curator Zoe Butt shared with us their perspectives on Vietnam, its ancient culture and current concerns. We exchanged ideas on the history and fluctuating state of contemporary visual arts within an unsettling and watchful context. Each one of our interlocutors was a pioneer, knowingly pushing boundaries and, whilst clearly building a grassroots scene, cautiously observing official reactions.

Our visit to Sàn Art’s space was a total surprise. Set in a modest but stunning French colonial three-storey building, the ground level serves as a decent-sized exhibition space and tiny reading room. The upper levels consist of various rooms occupied by an artistcollective film/media production house and an empty meeting room, save for a computer sitting on an antique Vietnamese table, in which we gathered.

We began to engage with Dinh Q. Lê’s work on screen. Nothing concrete had been brought in from the studio. Dinh apologetically explained that there was no point visiting his work space: everything was on exhibition, out of the country. Plied with tea, and over several hours, we moved haltingly through dozens of images, pausing to question and confer, stopping to discuss and compare. I learned that South China Sea Pishkun,3 2009, his first animation, was based on the frantic and often failed attempts by American helicopters to reach aircraft carrier safety post the fall of Saigon. One image, however, fully focused my attention: an anonymous face from Mot Coi Di Ve (Spending One’s Life Trying to Find One’s Way Home), Version 1, 2000. Rows of photographs were strung across a large space forming a fragile wall where silent voices spoke poignantly of lives lost and memories buried. I had found my point of entry into Dinh’s work: the lost and the disappeared, unusually thrust into centre position; the nod, conscious or not, to fellow artists Christian Boltanski and Doris Salcedo. In my mind, Dinh Q. Lê was set to become SCAF’s eleventh invited artist.

While in New York in November 2010, to work and to assist my son Emile and his young family settle in for a protracted stay so as to film Steve McQueen’s second feature film, Shame, I was happily able to

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– follow my Dinh quest at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Together with my not-yet-three year old grandson, Zachary, I spent an hour or more watching The Farmers and the Helicopters, 2006 (MOMA, 30 June 2010 – 24 January 2011), a three-part filmic work accompanied by a fabricated helicopter built by a Vietnamese farmer and a Vietnamese self-taught mechanic. The American machine, symbolic of both the horrors of war and high hopes for the future, fascinated little Zachary and drew me again into the history and hopes of the artist whose work increasingly commanded international attention and to whom I had become significantly committed.

Finally onto Erasure, our SCAF-commissioned Dinh Q. Lê work, which represents, in part, Dinh’s continuing interest in exposing the disturbing and tragic impact of the Vietnam War and the establishment of the Vietnamese diaspora, of which he is a casualty. We are privileged and honoured to present this powerful and confronting installation in the midst of the current political debate on the plight of those who seek refuge in Australia from the violence and terror in their home countries.

Zoe Butt, curator of the project with SCAF Associate Director Amanda Henry, describes the genesis, symbolism, outreach and significance of the work in her thoughtful essay in this catalogue. The hugely generous and unsolicited support of Nicholas and Angela Curtis has added an unexpected layer of meaning to Dinh Q. Lê’s commission. The Curtises have provided major financial underpinning to the project and their committed approach to the conceptual base of the installation – their visit to Dinh Q. Lê’s studio in Saigon and the deep and intelligent interest they have shown in his work – raises the bar for philanthropic action in Australia.

I leave our audiences to ponder not only the tragedy of Vietnam’s long conflict4 and the saga of its oft-forgotten boat people, but also our own harsh one-size-fits-all illegal immigrant policy, whereby asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran and Iraq are often branded ‘queue jumpers’ rather than many being recognised as persecuted intelligentsia and aspirational class members of their respective countries eager to live in peace and freedom – their right, it seems to me, and the right of all humankind.

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Endnotes 1 – A full list of SCAF’s exhibitions and partnerships is provided at the end of this catalogue.

2 – Graham Greene’s 1995 novel The Quiet American was partly written during his stay at the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi while on assignment for Paris Match in 1951.

Later, Phillip Noyce directed Michael Caine in a film version of the book. Both director and actor stayed at the Metropole.

3 – Pishkun is an American Indian term which signals the site where bison were destroyed by herding them off a cliff.

4 – The Vietnamese people endured three decades of war, causing many of them to flee the violence, particularly in the late 1970s. While the causes and details of the conflict are complex, the chronology that follows is a useful reminder of significant events.

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imeline: Vietnam T A chronology of key events

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1930 Ho Chi Minh founds the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).

1941 ICP organises a guerrilla force, Viet Minh, in response to invasion by Japan during the Second World War. 1945 The Viet Minh seizes power. Ho Chi Minh announces Vietnam’s independence.

1946 French forces attack Viet Minh in Haiphong, sparking the war of resistance against the colonial power.

1950 The Democratic Republic of Vietnam is recognised by China and USSR. 1954 At the Geneva conference, Vietnam is split into North and South at the 17th Parallel.

1956 South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem begins campaign against political dissidents.

1962 Number of US military advisers in South Vietnam rises to 12,000.

1963 Viet Cong, the communist guerrillas operating in South Vietnam, defeat units of the South Vietnamese Army. President Diem is overthrown.

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US enters the war 1964 US destroyer allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats. This triggers the start of pre-planned American bombing raids on North Vietnam.

1965 200,000 American combat troops arrive in South Vietnam.

1966 US troop numbers in Vietnam rise to 400,000, then to 500,000 the following year.

1968 Tet Offensive – a combined assault by Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army on US positions – begins. More than 500 civilians die in the US massacre at My Lai. 1969 Ho Chi Minh dies. President Nixon begins to reduce US ground troops in Vietnam as domestic public opposition to the war grows.

1973 Ceasefire agreement in Paris. US troop pull-out completed.

1975 North Vietnamese troops invade South Vietnam and take control of the whole country after South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh surrenders.

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Reconstruction 1976 Socialist Republic of Vietnam proclaimed. Saigon is renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Hundreds of thousands flee abroad, including many ‘boat people’.

1979 Vietnam invades Cambodia and ousts the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. In response, Chinese troops cross Vietnam's northern border. They are pushed back

by Vietnamese forces. The number of ‘boat people’ trying to leave Vietnam causes international concern.

1986 Nguyen Van Linh becomes party leader. He introduces a more liberal economic policy.

1989 Vietnamese troops withdraw from Cambodia.

1992 New constitution adopted allowing certain economic freedoms. The Communist Party remains the leading force in Vietnamese society.

Source: BBC News, Timeline: Vietnam, 7 February 2011, <news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/country_profiles/1243686.stm>, accessed 20 May 2011.

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– Erasure An interview with Dinh Q. Lê Dolla S. Merrillees General Manager – Artistic and Educational Programmes Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation –

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This edited interview with Dinh Q. Lê was conducted by Dolla S. Merrillees through email exchanges in April/May 2011 and in follow-up telephone conversations on 13 and 25 May 2011.

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Boat wreck off Christmas Island, 15 December 2010 Amateur footage (still)

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DSM: What did you set out to achieve with Erasure? What was the impetus for this work?

DQL: I have always planned to explore my immigration history. My work in the last fifteen years has led me to research deeper and deeper into the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. But over the years I have always paid attention to the plights of the boat refugees around the world. It’s something that I identify so strongly with. To see the rising number of boat refugees due to political and economic upheavals and the rise in the anti-immigration movement is disheartening. The desire for me to make this work has been bubbling up for a long time. When Dr Gene Sherman invited me to create a project for SCAF, and when I saw the footage of the boat wreck off Christmas Island in 2010, I knew it was the right time and the right place to explore this issue.

When I set out to make Erasure, my interests were to explore the complexity of the immigration issue, the contradictory and sometimes racist policies. It is bewildering and frustrating to observe from a distance. What I wanted to achieve most in this project was to remind people that we are talking about individuals who in their most desperate state are willing to risk everything, including their lives, just for the chance to have a decent life.

I also hope that the work will enable the audience in Australia to remember that we are all immigrants. Somewhere along the way we have consciously or unconsciously erased our past as immigrants – through the need to forget in order to begin anew or to forge a new country or to assimilate into one. Only in remembering their origin can Australians empathise with the plights of the recent boat refugees.

Of your time in the US, you say that ‘it doesn’t matter how many years we’ve been in America or in the West, we’re still immigrants, still visitors. I don’t know how many generations it’s going to take before we’ll feel that we are not visitors.’1 As you know, Vietnamese refugees began arriving in Australia in the late 1970s and now form one of the largest ethnic groups in the country. They have contributed significantly to the Australian landscape.

Despite this, do you think this sense of dislocation, of not taking root, marks every refugee and immigrant?

My experience in America from the late seventies to the mid-nineties was a very difficult time. Growing up the middle of suburbia of southern California was too alienating. Both external and internal factors prevented me from ever feeling like I could belong and I think I went to America with the imprint of Vietnam too prominent in me already. I was also reminded of this from time to time by others, in sometimes subtle ways, sometimes very direct, sometimes unconsciously, that I was not from there. I think the young generation today seems to be much more open and less conscious about race issues. But then once in a while, I

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– read about the new anti-immigration movements and I start to wonder if it has changed that much.

Everyone’s experience will be different. Some will assimilate much better than others. Some are lucky to be in an environment that is more open and accepting and that will help them to be able to take root. Everyone will feel some sense of dislocation and some will come up with a strategy to deal with it while others won’t.

South China Sea Pishkun, 2009 3-D digital animation Duration 6:30 mins Courtesy the artist

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As a child you were physically and culturally displaced from your hometown of Ha Tien following its invasion by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, finally immigrating to the US in 1979. You subsequently returned to live and work in Ho Chi Minh City. How have you negotiated this intersection of East and West? Do you define yourself as Vietnamese-American?

As I get older and more sure of myself, I have learnt to accept and appreciate the multilayers of the sometimes contradictory East/West parts of myself. To be both – to define and redefine my identity – provides me with a rich terrain within which to exist. There are times that the contradictions within myself are a problem but most of the time I have learnt to appreciate and embrace them. I think it keeps me on my toes; to not take things for granted. Also these days my idea of belonging is very different. It’s not about fitting in anymore but to be in a community that appreciates you for who you are.

I have been back in Vietnam for more then fifteen years now.

Today, I see myself more and more as Vietnamese. Still, there are days when I think I am still too Americanised and wonder what I am doing here in Vietnam, but this feeling is fleeting.

Your work has been described as weaving personal history with larger cultural histories and mythologies. How do you deal with memory in your practice? How do you give it voice – what to keep, what to let go of, what to recount?

Memory for me is a point of departure. My projects are sometimes triggered by an event in my past but I am more interested in how that memory connects to what is happening today, the present. Somewhere between research, reading, learning, spending a long time with the subject, visions/images emerge. This is why my works are so different from one project to the other.

In my series From Hollywood to Vietnam, 2003–05, I interwove Hollywood movies including Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now with black and white photojournalistic images shot during the Vietnam War and found family snapshots. This process of weaving my own personal memories, media-influenced memories, and Hollywood-fabricated memories is a way to give voice to the instability of memory and questions of accountability, control and meaning from these three different sources.

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– Likewise The Farmers and the Helicopters, 2006, interlaces the personal recollections of the war of Vietnamese locals with clips from Western films. Many of the people I interviewed relayed childhood memories of the horrors associated with helicopters during the war and the priority for me was to let them speak. I wanted to give them voice.

They have always been depicted as shadows and for the first time the Vietnamese became prominent in a moving image setting. Being invited to exhibit this work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in 2010 only confirmed that there is a strong interest in what we have to say.

Untitled (Milano 002), 2004 From Vietnam to Hollywood series Colour photographs and linen tape 0.97 m x 1.83 m Courtesy the artist

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You use a variety of media including film, video, photography and installation. Does the project predicate the medium or does the medium suggest itself as the project develops?

Most of the time it is the subject of the project that predicates the medium. When I am doing research for a project, visions emerge.

Sometimes it takes a little while to sift through these visions to find the right one for the project. These visions dictate the medium.

For example I’m working on a project now for 2012, interviewing a number of senior artists who participated in the war, creating propaganda posters on the one hand and on the other producing intensely personal and intimate drawings of their comrades. I’m interested in the role of the artist in this environment and in exploring the relationship between art, ideology and propaganda. I’ve been collecting these pictures for some time and talking to these artists brought these sketches alive for me. I want to use the animation process to transform these static images, to create a narrative and bring them to life.

You spent many years buying black and white photographs in second-hand stores in Vietnam in the hope of finding pictures of your own family, and you’ve incorporated thousands of these self-portraits and family and passport photos into Erasure. Are these photographs of oan hpn (lost souls) or a celebration of life?

These photographs are a celebration of life. Because of conflicts and systematic erasure, these records have been forgotten and have lain dormant for too long. These photographs hold memories of joy, of moments that people want to keep. Whether I am able to find my own family photographs or not, these photographs are now serving as surrogates to the lost personal photographs of my family and the thousands of others who also lost theirs. These photographs are a testimony to a part of my life and thousands of other lives.

By encouraging the visitor to pick up these photos how does Erasure ask us to unearth our own memories?

These portraits, these family snapshots, are so universal. Each photo tells a story – the family on holiday, on outings, having fun with

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– friends, celebrating birthdays, all images that we all have taken hundreds of times. Everyone will be able to find something in these photographs to connect with.

Photos are a tangible link to loved ones and family history and I want people to actively participate, to sift through the piles, hold the photos in their hands and find something they can connect to.

This sense of identification is an important component of the project.

The audience is encouraged to pick up these photographs, which will be removed one by one, scanned, catalogued, stored and uploaded to a purpose-built website for people to browse through and hopefully retrieve the memories of their own families.

People lead busy lives. They filter their memories and selectively remember experiences. Active participation can only enhance memory and connection. I want to include the audience in the conversation.

I am very interested in your use of the archival process as a means of excavating history, uncovering stories and documenting loss; for example, Moi Coi Di Ve, 2000, with its hundreds of delicate photographs and inscriptions. Is the process a healing, a rethreading of your life?

Yes, I guess you could say it is a healing process and rethreading of a part of my life. As a child, I lived through these larger historical events that left me feeling so helpless and in the dark. When my family immigrated to the US, I did everything I could to bury the past and begin a new life. Well it did not work out very well. As you can see, I ended up back in Vietnam trying to unearth everything I buried. In my work, I try to learn as much as I can about what happened. I think in a way it gives me some sense of control and at the same time allows me some closure.

The Farmers and the Helicopters, 2006 Three-channel colour video with sound (15 mins), handcrafted full-size helicopter In collaboration with Tran Quoc Hdi, Lê Vcn Danh, Hà Thúc Phù Nam and Tubn Andrew Nguyen Installation view, Project 93: Dinh Q. Le, MoMA, New York, 2010–11 Courtesy the artist

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Buddhism had a great influence on the Vietnamese people.

The belief in rebirth means that many people view their present life as a reflection of actions in a previous life.

Are you conscious of this influence in your own practice?

A lot of people have asked me about the influence of Buddhism on my practice over the years. Growing up in this environment, Buddhism definitely has an influence in my life and my work. People were surprised to find that in all my work, there is no anger, no accusation. Your question takes an interesting twist on the same question. No, I have not thought about my work from this rebirth or karma perspective. In Vietnam, Buddhist teachings are imbedded in the everyday.

How has living in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam affected your practice? Has it brought about a change in perspective?

Living in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam definitely has affected my practice. I have taken on roles that I would not have had I stayed in America. Contemporary art in Vietnam faces tough challenges because of

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Mot Coi Di Ve (Spending One’s Life Trying to Find One’s Way Home), Version 1, 2000 Found B&W photographs, thread, linen tape 4 m x 6 m Installation view Courtesy the artist

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– censorship and cultural policing. The art schools here teach traditional art, not contemporary art. These schools are not able to meet the needs of the young artists and many artists travel overseas to study or pursue their practice. As a result Vietnamese diaspora artists have had a strong presence in America and Europe over the last ten years. MoMA, the Queensland Art Gallery and other important institutions have already collected and exhibited a number of artists like An-My Lê, Trinh T. Minh-hà, Danh Võ, Tâm Vcn Tran, and myself. I think there is a growing interest in how the Vietnamese experience is represented and remembered.

I, and some of my colleagues, have taken on roles of gallerist, educator and community activist to help to fulfil the needs of young artists. The definition of our practice has expanded to include these roles and we conceived of Sàn Art, our independent, artist-run exhibition space and reading room, as a place of experimentation offering both emerging and established artists, whose work has been overlooked by the commercial system, the opportunity to show in a new context and try out ideas.

In terms of changed perspective, I have learned to be patient and inventive in presenting our works. Intellectual, artistic and political censorship plays a major role in Vietnam. I have to always be mindful of the government censors and, even more problematic, I struggle with self-censorship. As an artist I don’t want to be stifled, I want to give voice to my work. I want to take the risk because the frustration of not making or not doing is worse for me. The recent crackdown on dissidents in China and Vietnam makes me want to push back. I am concerned about repercussions but I hope that one day the Vietnamese Government will change enough for me to show more of my work in Vietnam. We’ll see!

Untitled, 2010 From Cambodia: Splendour and Darkness series Colour photographs and linen tape 1.20 m x 1.75 m Courtesy the artist

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Given the heated political debate over Australia’s immigration policies and its stance on asylum seekers, and as a refugee yourself, how do you hope Australian audiences will receive or react to your work?

Strange as it may sound considering the subject matter I am dealing with, I just hope that Australian audiences will simply open themselves to enjoy and to experience this first as an artwork. Many Australians have heard a variety of arguments about immigrant and refugee issues before, perhaps opening themselves to experience this complex and perplexing issue on a more visceral level from the perspective of someone who lived through the whole boat refugee/immigrant experience will give them some insight.

– Endnote 1 – ‘An interview

with Dinh Q. Lê and Stefano Catalani’ in A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Lê, Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington, US, 2007.

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– Erasure Archiving fear in the struggle against forgetfulness Zoe Butt Co-Director and Curator Sàn Art Ho Chi Minh City –

– The act of erasure can be a violent and rapid ‘undoing’. In seconds, Mother Nature can unleash a tsunami, unforgivingly wiping out an entire country’s coastline; destructive winds can wreak havoc with fishermen carrying their precious refugee cargo, forcing them towards unknown craggy rocks that decimate their existence; within minutes fire can spread and leave nothing but dust and cinders in its wake. The elements of the universe form a powerful system that is beyond humanity’s control; we can but observe, hypothesise, and attempt to calculate cause and effect.

Sadly, this scientific, factor-driven process that we apply to nature is mirrored in our treatment of our fellow human beings: quarantine, interrogation and removal are equally reductive and repetitive actions. Examples are plentiful. Think of the colonial projects and the desire for new territories, which spread disease and wiped out thousands in the New World. The determination of an Aryan race was pursued through the Nazi-driven Holocaust. After the partition of India millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims on the wrong side of the newly formed, colonially dictated border were slaughtered. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge all but obliterated its people through ‘re-education’ centres, hard physical labour, famine and, often, execution. On his worldwide journey of scientific discovery, Captain Cook anchored the Endeavour in what is now Sydney’s Botany Bay, declared the country terra nullius – ‘earth belonging to no one’ – and claimed Australia’s east coast as Britain’s. On the same journey Cook’s botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, recorded his perceptions of the Kameygal1 people in his journals: ‘the hair of their heads was bushy and thick but by no means wooley like that of a Negro; they were of a common size, lean and seemd active and nimble; their voices were coarse and strong’.2 Did he think to consider that this land belonged to them?

National borders are complex sites of fear, often controlled by protective, epicurean motives, whereby calculated decisions are based on a privileged agenda known only to a select few and publicly argued with carefully framed words of persuasion. Dinh Q. Lê is both compelled and disturbed by the duplicitous decisions implemented across the world under the rubric of crisis control and prevention.3 A boat refugee who fled Vietnam as a boy in 1978, he understands and remembers all too well the anxiety of an immigrant who must endure interrogation, quarantine, and the erasure of cultural customs under the expectations of social assimilation into a foreign community.

In Lê’s Erasure the darkened gallery space is filled with the sounds of a blazing fire and howling wind. On one wall is a single floor-toceiling moving image of an eighteenth century wooden ship leaning beached on an isolated white sandy coastline, its hull and sails rapidly consumed by flames. The camera pans slowly around this symbol of Empire as the fire greedily licks its life away; the sky above is lit with a striking melancholy. We are struck by the dramatic chiaroscuro of this ‘moving painting’. It is as if William Turner has returned to the digital age with his wistful fascination for light. Lê renders the beauty of this seafaring

Dinh Q. Lê, Erasure, 2011 Single-channel, 2K HD colour video with sound (7 mins); found photographs, clothing, stone, wooden boat fragments; computer, scanner, dedicated website <erasurearchive.net> Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Courtesy the artist

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The video component of Erasure, 2011, was produced by The Propeller Group <propeller-group.com>.

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erasurearchive.net The Erasure online photographic archive forms part of the Erasure multimedia installation. The images on the website are essential components of this artwork, which recalls countless memories of enforced exile across the globe. These photographs were predominantly found in antique stores in Ho Chi Minh City and most likely belong to the thousands of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ who took to the sea in fear for their lives as a result of the Vietnam War.

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– vessel in a continual, unending loop of destruction. The burning hull moves eerily between substance and shadow as its own likeness is split and collapses in on itself, as though a kind of double-sighted madness has taken hold of the lens. The perpetual cycle of self-combustion allows our attention to shift to the repercussion of this repeated violence – small islands of ‘debris’ resting on the floor, perhaps suggesting that the burning virtual vessel has spewed its contents into the actual physical space. Amidst boulders, wooden fragments and discarded clothing are thousands of small black and white faces locked forever in silver gelatin. Self-portraits, family shots, passport-style facial profiles and miscellaneous landscapes rest in random, chaotic fashion. Visitors bend down to reach these filigree-edged photographs, some no larger than the size of a thumb. The frozen faces appear like the flotsam and jetsam of a churned sea, some images turned down and begging to be uncovered, others vacantly staring upwards, striking an inner human bell of conscience.

It is difficult to fathom the collation of this quantity of images, particularly as each image is unique. These are not photographs lovingly framed and cared for in vellum family albums; they were found dusty and uncategorised in antique stores in Ho Chi Minh City. They are intimate memories abandoned in haste, left behind in the midst of the conflict of the Vietnam War and most likely belonging to the uncountable number of refugees who took to the sea in desperation. From the rear of the room we hear the whirring of a digital computer scanner. The laser light produces an eerie shadow as it scans across the image under its radar.

We recognise the clicking of a mouse, the shuffle of someone’s repetitive movements, and soon realise that these articles of human ‘debris’ are slowly and steadily being removed, documented, catalogued and stored, placed in a rational archival order – soon to be publicly forgotten save for the pixel images on a dedicated website (erasurearchive.net), where perhaps someone might find a lost loved one.4 It is fitting that the ship in Erasure is but a mere illusion, for it refers to the influence of human imagination in scientific discovery, a crucial factor in colonial expansion: by rationalising their imagined ‘understanding’ of the Indigenous inhabitants, colonials could systemise and control. The video image of the vessel, mirrored and folding in on itself, is also an intriguing metaphor: history is presented in reference to itself.

The chaos of debris and human remnants on the floor, objects symbolising the silent voices of the victims, visually challenges the repetitive violence in the video image. This is the artist’s attempt to humanise the inherited historical phobia of the ‘Other’, to give physicality to the experience of each individual’s conflict. Thus, the photographs among islands of rock, wooden boat fragments and discarded clothing, and their categorisation by the archivist, are of particular significance to the installation. We are forced to contemplate the aftermath of conflict, to register the slow disappearance of evidence

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– into classified systems, where the experience of loss, together with its associated objects, becomes buried in collections that are predominantly removed from public historical consciousness. While respecting the role of archives in providing a record of social memory, Lê is concerned with how that history is activated and re-engaged within a larger collective memory for future generations. An experiential eloquence emerges from the wreckage of Erasure as we feel the light of the video caress these islands of conflict and the near-forgotten subjects in the countless photographs silently undulating at our feet: their voices are muted but they are near bursting with tales waiting to be revealed. We are encouraged to hold and scan these images; to give them a public virtual life online.

Lê confronts society’s apathy towards the complexities of arrivals and departures in the history of ‘civilisation’. Perturbed by the legitimisation of quarantine, interrogation, enslavement and assimilation, and aware that a vast number of human experiences are failing to appear in the public chronicle, Lê challenges the role of art and the public archive, and questions our effectiveness in documenting history. The practice of rationalising humanity into anthropological and ethnographical subjects has prejudicially served the power relations between conqueror and subject (museum and library collections across the Western world are testament to this fact), but how are we, as twenty-first century dwellers, learning from the effects of this rationalisation? If ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’,5 how can images and objects of experiential value to society’s understanding of conflict be better contextualised for future generations?

The formation of this installation viscerally crystallised with Lê after he viewed online amateur video documentation of the small, makeshift fishing boat that smashed against the rocks of Christmas Island,6 an Australian external territory 2600 kilometres north-west of Perth, on 15 December 2010. Fierce weather conditions had prevented border patrol units from detecting the Indonesian wooden vessel carrying refugee families from Iraq and Iran. Authorities believed those on board the boat had braved the stormy seas, with a cyclone pounding north of the island, because they would decrease their chances of being intercepted. Island residents looked on helplessly while babies and children cried frantically for help as their tiny bodies disappeared amongst the wooden debris. It is believed that up to fifty people died. Following the incident, public complaints were voiced at the financial cost to the nation of funerals for the deceased. Soon after, residents of the Christmas Island detention centre rioted within its overcrowded cells. Needless to say the plight of refugees and asylum seekers within Australia was brought, again, to international attention in the most unfavourable light. It is worth considering whether Australia’s twentieth century headlines of ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Invasion’ underpin the paranoia concerning illegal arrivals. A recent report suggests that in 2011 Australia faces ‘the largest wave of uninvited asylum seekers in the nation’s history’7 – a claim that focuses

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– on the illegal journeys of boat people as a continuing global phenomenon being met by fragmented international cooperation, as opposed to a world war conflict with an ‘organised’ resolution agreed to by allies.8 How soon we forget that Australia once relied on the arrival of ships flowing with European immigrants to boost its economic and defence capabilities and develop into a nation – a nation of hope and opportunity for many migrants from across the world.

Indeed, images of the Indonesian smuggling boat calamity off Christmas Island would not have been dissimilar to those of the tragic loss of the Irish clipper, the Dunbar, in 1857. The world-class passenger liner smashed to pieces against the rocks of Sydney Harbour, leaving one survivor from 122 passengers. The fate of the Dunbar drove home the difficulties of long-distance sea travel, subsequently forcing an improvement of navigation facilities in the area. Its loss is marked by a ritual of anniversary remembrance9 and it is also commemorated in the Australian National Maritime Museum’s ‘Dunbar Shipwreck Collection’,10 which consists of an assortment of anchors, bottles, coins, buttons, spectacles, a telescope, a sextant and a cannon. But what exists in our memory of the other innumerable boats that have met tragedy along the world’s largest continental coastline? Why are some maritime tragedies recorded, memorialised and remembered while others are not? Why are society’s rituals marking arrivals so quick to privilege those that we expect when the Australian colony itself was founded on a violent intrusion?

Intriguingly, under current Australian quarantine law, all boats that unlawfully enter Australian territory are burned and destroyed.

Evidence of these unwelcome events is eradicated for fear victims will use it when venting details of their plight. In understanding the power of images as persuasive devices, and in recognising that by limiting information you can control social attitudes, it becomes apparent that there are few public forums on the experiences of those on board these horrifically fragile, overcrowded boats. Instead, they are relegated to procedural categories of ‘asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’ or ‘smuggler’. Erasure offers an opportunity for a collective remembrance of the veiled acts of violence carried out under the pretence of ‘control and protect’. The burning vessel is a double-faced symbol; it embraces ideas of survival, hope and scientific discovery while representing oppression, slavery and death. Countless people continue to suffer the cultural, political and social injustices of history and prejudice, with more than fifteen million people11 today daring to risk their lives for freedom as refugees.

Dinh Q. Lê recalls his own desperate run for freedom from Vietnam with his mother and six siblings as they bolted across a stretch of beach towards a fishing boat, machine guns firing at their sand-whipped feet. He doesn’t remember how his ten-year-old self made it on board but he will never forget the look on his mother’s face as she scoured the southern beach near Ha Tien for signs of her eldest sons and daughter

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– – desperate, anxious, shocked. They could not see them anywhere. The coastline soon became a vanishing point: erased. They had no idea where they were going. They just knew there was no turning back. Lê recounts the experience of being at sea: the vastness of its belly, the great resounding silence. As the ocean lapped the boat hull it served to count the minutes and the hours as they inched away from a known death to an unpredictable future. He remembers being awestruck as their small vessel, holding seventy-eight souls, passed a giant black freighter, feeling so small and insignificant in comparison and being stunned and confused when this powerful black monster did not collect them, but merely threw water.

He remembers the Thai pirates finding his little stash of gold with their poking guns when they boarded their boat. During the months of shrapnel dodging, bomb shelters and makeshift dwellings before they were left with no choice but to flee their homeland, Lê’s mother had insisted each of her children carry a tiny pocket of gold. His mother managed to hold onto her own secret packages away from greedy hands, in addition to the $15,000 in gold it cost to make this journey. They eventually sighted the coast of Thailand and arrived to a curious crowd of onlookers who took them to Songkhla refugee camp. Their first location was a prison quarters shantytown: tin-roofed, overcrowded and a local eyesore. After six months the camp was relocated to the coast. Lê remembers the sheer relief of space and open air, of the familiar feeling of water at his feet.12 Much of Lê’s art confronts the power dynamics of social ignorance and examines the complex decisions that direct the rituals of remembering in contemporary life. As a member of a global body politic burdened with an alarming increase in injustice and atrocities and a massive deluge of virtual data (for example, via the Internet, television and film) that can detach viewers from their responsibility to revive and question historical statistics, Lê turns to his art as a medium to prompt and reveal. From his woven photographs that juxtapose the victims of Pol Pot’s regime with the majesty of Angkor Wat (such as the ongoing Splendour and Darkness series that began in 1997) to his large-scale sculptural video installations that speak of hope and resilience during the first helicopter war (such as the Farmers and the Helicopters, 2006), Lê’s artistic practice serves as a monument to remembering. As an obsessive scavenger of historical fact, his art magically contrasts particular histories through the powerful use of iconic objects. In Erasure, the boat is a vessel and a tool, drawing together the melancholic narrative that lies on the floor beneath.

Lê’s installation conjures up recent controversial international debates concerning refugees and asylum seekers. It responds to the distance that exists between victim and witness – a distance mediated by government policy and the popular press – by encouraging us to become involved in the victims’ stories, to handle and record the photographs strewn on the floor. We are confronted with the rationality of exclusion and inclusion in the forensic categorisation of crisis. As

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– the transfixed faces within this black and white photographic ocean become grafted to the virtual skin of a website, we realise another memory is being formed. Erasure furthers Dinh Q. Lê’s commitment to the artistic process as a means of excavating history and revealing alternative ideas of loss and redemption.

– Endnotes 1 – The author

has assumed Banks was describing the Kameygal people who lived in the Botany Bay area at the time: <www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/themes/ theme1.htm>, viewed 8 May 2011.

2 – Sir Joseph

Banks, ‘1770 April 19. New Holland sighted’ in The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks, <www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0501141h.html - apr1770>, accessed 8 May 2011.

3 – For example,

Cambodia broke into civil war in 1970, culminating in the control of the country by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Thousands of refugees fled to Thailand and other neighbouring countries. In 1979, the Thai Government collected the Cambodian refugees scattered across the country and sent them to Preah Vihear where the American, French and Australian Consulates were permitted to select 1200 people for resettlement. According to an American eyewitness, the remaining people were brutally pushed over an escarpment overlooking the Cambodian plains, many dying due to either the fall or the landmines at the foot of the escarpment.

It has been suggested that over 42,000 people were sent back to Cambodia in this way. See <www.topix.com/forum/world/cambodia/TIPEHBGTR37CFJGAC>.

4 – The online

archive of Erasure <erasurearchive.net> is one of the first photographic archives of pre-1975 Southern Vietnamese society.

5 – Milan Kundera,

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York, 1999, p. 4.

6 – Under the

Howard Government, Christmas Island was excised from Australia’s migration zone and thus any person arriving illegally was unable to apply for Australian refugee status. The Royal Australian Navy was responsible for moving these people to neighbouring countries for processing. This system was called the ‘Pacific Solution’.

7 – Paul Maley, ‘Who’s afraid 8 – Between 1965 and 1979 the

of Christmas Island now?’, Australian, 8 January 2011.

significant number of Vietnamese boat people became an international crisis, causing the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to coordinate the establishment of refugee camps in neighbouring countries. But the Vietnam War, which brought about this catastrophe, also affected Cambodians, Laotians and Chinese/Vietnamese who were discriminated against in Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia (1978) and the collapse of relations between Vietnam and China (1979).

9 – David Nutley,

‘The Dunbar tragedy: 150 years but the memory lives on’ in Newsletter of the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology (AIMA), vol. 26, no. 4, December 2007, pp. 1 and 5–7.

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10

The ‘Dunbar Shipwreck Collection’ belongs to the Australian National Maritime Museum: <www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime/dunbar/>, accessed 8 May 2011.

11 – The International

Organization of Migration states that today there are 214 million international migrants worldwide, with 15.2 million categorised as refugees: <www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/about-migration/facts-and-figures/lang/en>, accessed 27 February 2011.

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12

Conversation between the author and Dinh Q. Lê, March 2011.

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– Selected Biography

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1968 Born in Ha Tien, Vietnam 1989 Bachelor of Arts in Art Studio, University of California, Santa Barbara, US 1992 Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Related Media, School of Visual Arts, New York, US 1993 Returned to Vietnam for the first time Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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Solo Exhibitions 2011 Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia Dinh Q. Lê: Saigon Diary, UB Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, New York, US 2010 Projects 93: Dinh Q. Lê, Museum of Modern Art, New York, US 2007 A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Lê, Bellevue Art Museum, Washington State, US 2005 Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium, The Art of Dinh Q. Lê, Asia Society, New York, US

– 2008 2nd Singapore Biennale – Wonders, Singapore 2007 Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany 2006 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT5), Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia 6th Gwangju Biennial – Fever Variations, Gwangju, Korea Persistent Vestiges: Drawings from the AmericanVietnam War, The Drawing Center, New York, US Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism, Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art, Udine, Italy 2005 Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, International Center for Photography, New York, US Universal Experience, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US 2003 50th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale – Delays and Revolutions, Venice, Italy

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Books Dougherty, L.J., Dinh Q. Lê: North Caroline Museum of Art Handbook of the Collection, NCMA Publications, Raleigh, US, 2010 Grundberg, A., Dateline: Israel: New Photography and Video Art, Yale University Press, New Haven, US, 2007 Kim, E., Machida, M. & Mizota, S., Fresh Talk, Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art, University of California Press, Berkeley, US, 2003 Lê, Dinh Q., Roth, M. & Miles, C., Dinh Q. Lê: From Vietnam to Hollywood, Marquand Books, New York, US, 2003 Selz, P., Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, University of California Press, Berkeley, US, 2007 The Light Work Annual 2001: Contact Sheet Number 112, Light Work, Syracuse, NY

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Exhibition Catalogues

Awards

2011 Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia 2010 Allen, E., The Farmers and the Helicopters, Museum of Modern Art, New York, US 2008 Eden, X., Roberts, J. & Cook, S., The Lining of Forgetting: Internal & External Memory in Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, US 2006 The Sixth Gwangju Biennale 2006: Fever Variations, Designhouse Co. and Gwanju Biennale Foundation, Gwangju, Korea Witness to War: Revisiting Vietnam in Contemporary Art, San Francisco State University Fine Art Gallery, San Francisco, US 2005 Bonami, F., Universal Experience, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US Jacquette, J., The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Dain Rauscher Art Collection, RBC Dain Rauscher, New York, US Lê, V., How Come Charlie Don’t Surf?, Vancouver Centre for International Asian Art, Canada Lee, D., Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium, The Art of Dinh Q. Lê, Asia Society, New York, US 2003 Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer. 50th International Art Exhibition, Marsilio Editori, Venice, Italy

2010 Prince Claus Laureate, the Netherlands

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Collections

Group Exhibitions

Bronx Museum, New York, US Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, US Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, New York, US Portland Art Museum, Portland, US Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, US Singapore Art Museum, Singapore

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Contributions to Cultural Organisations Co-founder, Vietnam Foundation for the Arts (VNFA), Los Angeles, US Co-founder, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Board member, Arts Network Asia, Singapore Board member, Cultural Development & Exchange Fund, Embassy of Denmark, Hanoi, Vietnam Member, International Council, Asia Society, New York, US

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2001 Indochina: The Art of War, Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, Los Angeles, US The Red Lotus, Gallery Chastain, Atlanta, US 1996 Edmunds, K., Pushing Image Paradigms, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, US Tucker, M., A Labor of Love, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, US 1995 Grundberg, A., Solnit, R. & Takaki, R., Tracing Cultures, Friends of Photography, San Francisco, US 1992 Kano, K., 3rd International Textile Competition, Kyoto Museum of Art, Kyoto, Japan 1991 Avery, V. & Roth, M., The Definitive Contemporary American Quilt, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, US Butler, C., Warp and Woof: Comfort and Dissent, Artists Space, New York, US

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Articles and Reviews

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2009 City Visions Festival – All That is Solid Melts into Air, Mechelen, Belgium Biennale Cuvée – World Selection of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria 55th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany

Selected Bibliography

2011 Larking, M., ‘Conceptualizing old ideas into “new” art’, Japan Times, April 2010 Aletti, V., ‘Project 93: Dinh Q. Lê’, New Yorker, 2 August Bovee, K., ’Dinh Q. Lê’, Art Papers Holland, C., ‘Vietnamese voices against a whirl of war’, New York Times, 12 August Hong-An, T., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at P.P.O.W’, Idiom, 16 February LaBelle, C., ‘4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale’, Art Forum, January Mizota, S., ‘“Stitches” at Armory Center for the Arts’, Los Angeles Times, 21 May 2009 Billah, F., ‘Paper cutting takes a lead role in CUT: makings of removal exhibition’, Breeze, October McQuaid, C., ‘Weaving together his Vietnam’, Boston Globe, March Movius, L., ‘Shanghai Biennale’, Art in America, January Rappolt, M., ‘Dinh Q. Lê’, ArtReview Magazine, issue 35, October Seno, A.A., ‘The collector: Dinh Q. Lê’, Wall Street Journal Asia, 21 August Snyder, S., ‘Dinh Q. Lê’, Artforum Online, May, <artforum.com/archive/id=22944> 2008 Cheng, S., ‘Pacific Overtures’, Art Ltd., September/October ‘Galleries Chelsea Review: Dinh Q. Lê’, New Yorker, 26 May

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– Hackett, R., ‘Stellar exhibits put the Bellevue Arts Museum back on this critic’s map’, Seattle Post, January Knight, C., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at Shoshana Wayne Gallery’, Los Angeles Times, 3 October Pincus, R., ‘The immigrant’s song’, San Diego Union Tribune, 14 February Tinari, P., ‘Reviews: 2008 Gwangju Biennale, Singapore Biennale 2008, 3rd Yokohama Triennale’, ArtForum, January Walsh, D., ‘Reviews: TransPOP – Korea Viet Nam Remix’, THE Magazine, December Wolff, R., ‘Dinh Q. Lê: PPOW’, ARTnews, summer 2007 Auricchio, L., ‘Vietnam: destination for the new millennium: the art of Dinh Q. Lê’, Artpapers, May Baker, K., ‘A look back at the Vietnam War gives artists no peace’, San Francisco Gate, 28 February Coulter-Smith, G., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves ZKM Gallery’, artintelligence, August Dougherty, L., ‘New contemporary acquisition explores conflicting memories of Vietnam War’, Preview, January/February Fenner, F., ‘Report from Brisbane: preserving the local’, Art In America, November Gallivan, J., ‘First Thursday: east meets west meets north’, Portland (Oregon) Tribune, 1 May Kent, R., ‘The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial’, FlashArt, March/April Libby, B., ‘Invisible roots’, (Portland) Oregonian, 20 May Pogrebin, R., ‘Asia society will build a contemporary art collection’, New York Times, 5 September Scheinman, P., ‘Altered, stitched, and gathered’, Fiberarts, April/May Speer, R., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at Elizabeth Leach Gallery’, Art Ltd, July Tran, T.N., ‘Weaving memories’, Northwest Asian Weekly, 6 October van Praag, J., ‘Dinh Q. Lê creates dialogue between cultures and generations’, International Examiner, Arts & Entertainment, vol. 34, no. 21 Vine, R., ‘Report from Gwangju: sins of omission’, Art in America, January Vinh, T., ‘Vietnamese artworks offer a personal view – and way to view – the war’, Seattle Times, 5 October 2006 Brooks, A., ‘Must see art’, LA Weekly, September Buckley, A., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery’, Artweek, December Duncan, M., ‘Opening salvos in LA’, Art in America, November Fyfe, J., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at the Asia Society and PPOW’, Art in America, May

– Gordon, A.F., ‘The Disasters of War’, Camerawork, vol. 33, no. 1 ‘One to Watch’, Artkrush, issue 43, 18 October, <http://artkrush.com/mailer/issue43/index. html#watch?> Sand, O., ‘Dinh Q. Lê’, Asian Art News, March 2005 Aletti, V., ‘Critic’s notebook: Saigon serenade’, New Yorker, 3 October Camhi, L., ‘After the fall: artists recall the immediacy and the aftershocks of war’, Village Voice, 9 December Chang, A., ‘Home vs. global society’, amNew York, 30 September – 2 October Cotter, H., ‘40 years later, America is studying war once more’, New York Times, 11 September Cotter, H., ‘Two sides’ viewpoints on the war in Vietnam’, New York Times, 9 December Duong, Quan M., ‘Vietnam memories’, Art Asia Pacific, fall Jana, R., ‘Tapestry-like tableaux’, Art on Paper, May/June Johnson, K., ‘Images of Vietnamese in the generation since the war’, New York Times, 7 October Relyea, L., ‘Universal experience: art, life, and the tourist’s eye’, Artforum, summer Schwendener, M., ‘Persistent vestiges: drawing from the American-Vietnam war’, Time Out New York, issue 531, 1–7 December Searle, A., ‘Holidays in hell’, Guardian, 11 October 2004 Aletti, V., ‘Review’, Village Voice, 14–20 April Donelan, C., ‘Noble truths in recent art’, ArtsScene, 16 January Hutterer, M., ‘Through some kind of hell: Dinh Q. Lê weaves stark images of the Vietnam War’, Independent, 1 April Pelloso, G., ‘Hollywood sotto tiro’, Corriere della Sera, 24 November Voices Choices Review, New Yorker, 12 April Woodward, J., ‘Cross-stitching impressions’, ArtsScene, 9–15 April 2003 Cantor, A., ‘Dinh Q. Lê: waking dreams’, Preview, April/May Hirsch, R., ‘Flexible images: handmade American photography 1969–2002’, Exposure Magazine, vol. 36, issue 1 Ly, B., ‘Devastated visions’, Art Journal, spring Pham Thi Thu Thuy, ‘2 Hoa si VN than gia su kien my thuat lon cua the goi’, Thao & Van Hoa, 5 May Row, D. K., ‘Dinh Q. Lêe’, (Portland) Oregonian, 14 March Row, D. K., ‘Weaving new memories’, Oregonian, 30 March

Spalding, D., ‘Weaving history: an interview with Dinh Q. Lê’, Art Asia Pacific, vol. 38, fall ‘The texture of memory’, Art Journal, spring 2002 Evans, S.E., ‘We are named’, Photography Quarterly, no. 83 Hesse, G., ‘Let us build a city and make for ourselves a name’, Photography Quarterly, no. 83 2001 ‘Critical Thinking’, Woodstock Times, 6 December Aletti, V., ‘Review’, Village Voice, 5 June Bonetti, D., ‘Trendy currents at SFMOMA’, San Francisco Examiner, 7 July McGee, C., ‘Review’, Daily News, 2 June ‘New exhibits featured at Center for Photography at Woodstock’, Antiques and the Arts Weekly, November Pagel, D., ‘Indochina: the Art of War exhibition misfires’, Los Angeles Times, 25 April Pham Thi Thu Thuy, ‘Dinh Q. Lê: toi la mot tieng noi’, Thao & Van Hoa, 24 December Roth, M., ‘Obdurate History’, Art Journal, summer 2000 Ollman, L., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at Shoshana Wayne’, Art in America, February Pagel, D., ‘Identity-based work looks dated in “shifting perceptions”’, Los Angeles Times, 22 May Pagel, D., ‘Photography that tells it like it is’, Los Angeles Times, 2 July 1999 Ise, C., ‘Pieces of history’, Los Angeles Times, 28 May Johnson, K., ‘Pattern at James Graham & Sons’, New York Times, 17 July Miller, K., ‘Dinh Q. Lê: Splendor and Darkness’, Art Papers, March/April Schwabsky, B., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at PPOW’, Artforum, February Svetvilas, C., ‘The art of war’, Dialogue, spring/summer Smith, R.F., ‘You can't go home again: art in exile’, Art New England, October/November 1998 Aletti, V., ‘Dinh Q. Lê’, Village Voice, 8 December Chattopadhyay, C., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies’, Asian Art News, March/April Ehmke, R., ‘Neither this nor that’, Afterimage, July/August Ise, C., ‘Headless Buddha weaves history myth’, Los Angeles Times, 6 March Johnson, K., ‘Dinh Q. Lê Art Guide’, New York Times, 11 December Miles, C., ‘Dinh Q. Lê at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies’, Artweek, April

Row, D.K., ‘Conflicting cultures, selves’, (Portland) Oregonian, 3 April 1994 McQuaid, C., ‘For Christ’s sake’, Boston Phoenix, 3 March Silver, J., ‘East and west woven into art’, Boston Herald, 16 February 1992 Atkins, R., ‘Scene and heard’, Village Voice, 8 December Glenn, J., ‘Integrating image and structure’, Fiber Arts, vol. 18, no. 5 Lipson, K., ‘An angry voice from Vietnam’, New York Newsday, December 1991 Aletti, V., ‘Playing God’, Village Voice, 23 April Heimerdinger, D., ‘Combinations’, Newsletter of the Friends of Photography, March/April Hoffman, M., ‘Independent visions’, Independent, 14 February Kelley, J., ‘Weavings of time and memory’, Artweek, 18 April Medlin, K., ‘News from California’, Asahi Camera, February.

Wright, D., ‘They don’t let reality f-stop them’, Daily Californian, 26 April 1990 Aletti, V., ‘Choice column’, Village Voice, 22 May Slesin, S., ‘Quilts that warm in new ways’, New York Times, 6 December Spencer, R., ‘Visions from the independents’, Santa Barbara Newspress, November

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Contributors

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Dr Gene Sherman AM is Chair and Executive Director of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. She has a specialised knowledge of art, literary theory and French and English literature and spent seventeen years teaching, researching and lecturing at secondary and tertiary levels. As Director of Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) she organised up to twenty-two exhibitions annually, including regional and national touring exhibitions within Australia, and international touring exhibitions through the Asia-Pacific region.

Gene and Brian Sherman sponsored a Master of Fine Arts Administration student at the College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales (1997–2007), a studio at Bundanon and a contemporary Australian art-research room at the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library, The University of Sydney. Dr Sherman is currently on the Board of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, and the Art & Australia Advisory Board and a member of the Tate Modern AsiaPacific Acquisition Committee. She regularly lectures to a wide range of institutions on topics such as gallery management, the art of collecting, philanthropy, private foundations, Australian and Asian contemporary artists, and contemporary Japanese fashion. Dr Sherman was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government (2003) and a Doctorate of Letters honoris causa by the University of Sydney (2008). She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010 for her cultural philanthropy and her support of emerging and established artists.

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Zoe Butt is a curator and writer currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Zoe is Co-Director/Curator of Sàn Art, Vietnam’s most active independent art space and reading room. She is also Curatorial Manager of Post ViDai, the only private collection dedicated to contemporary Vietnamese art. Previously she was Director, International Programmes, Long March Project – a multiplatform, international artist organisation and ongoing art project based in Beijing, China. From 2001 to 2007 she was Assistant Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery, where she assisted in the development of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT), key acquisitions for the Contemporary Asian Art collection, and other associated gallery programmes. Recent projects include: Chi Toi, Sàn Art, 2010; Memories and Beyond: 2010 Kuandu Biennale, Taiwan, 2010; Porcelain, with Superflex and The Propeller Group, Sàn Art, 2010; No Soul for Sale: A Festival for Independents, Tate Modern, UK, 2010; Syntax and Diction, Sàn Art, 2009; Time Ligaments, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 2009; China in Four Seasons: Guo Fengyi, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, 2009; Impossible is Nothing: Xu Zhen, Long March Space, China, 2008. She has previously written for Art Asia Pacific, Dispatch, Artlink, Printed Project, RealTime, publications with Hatje Cantz, and various art exhibition catalogues and monographs.

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Dolla S. Merrillees is General Manager – Artistic and Educational Programmes, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. Previously she worked as Director – Visual Arts, Museums and Galleries NSW, where she initiated and oversaw Leading from the Edge: 2005 National Public Galleries Summit, and as Exhibition Manager for the 2000 and 2002 Biennales of Sydney. As Assistant Curator, Decorative Arts and Design at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and Curator of Contemporary Craft at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, she contributed to projects such as 4 + 1:5 Contemporary Australian Designs, 1999, Contemporary Australian Craft, 1998, and Alvar Aalto: Points of Contact, 1996. She is the recipient of two Ian Potter Foundation Cultural Grants (1997; 2001) and over the course of her career has provided specialist advice to the not-forprofit sector on strategic planning, exhibition development and tours, programming and fundraising. She has written extensively for print and online media. Recent writing projects include The Woodcutter’s Wife, 2007; ‘Memento mori (remember that you must die)’ in Hair: Trunk Series, 2009; and ‘Blood, brain, barrier’ in Blood: Trunk Series, 2011. She is currently working on her forthcoming book, Island of Forgotten Fragments.

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Acknowledgements

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Previous Exhibitions

SCAF sincerely thanks Dinh Q. Lê and Zoe Butt for the immense creativity and thoughtfulness they have brought to this exhibition.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) was established in April 2008 as a not-for-profit organisation to champion research, education and exhibitions of significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, the AsiaPacific region and the Middle East. SCAF works closely with artists in commissioning new work and developing exhibitions that energise and respond to the gallery’s fourpart complex comprising a large exhibition area, mini ‘out-site’ space, versatile theatre annexe and Zen garden. Extensive projects are developed through partnerships with public art institutions at a regional, state and national level while broad public engagement with contemporary art is fostered through publishing and forum programmes. In addition, Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR), located directly across the road from the gallery, offers a supportive environment and accommodation for visiting artists, filmmakers, architects, writers, curators and scholars. The experience of developing Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) as a respected commercial and educational enterprise within the international art world underpins the Foundation at both a conceptual and practical level. Dr Gene Sherman AM, SCAF Chairman and Executive Director, has drawn on her extensive international networks to establish the Foundation, and initiates and guides its activities in collaboration with an advisory board of respected peers: Andrew Cameron, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts and Michael Whitworth. SCAF is a member of CIMAM, the International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art.

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction 1 May – 26 July 2008 Presented in partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney

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Thanks also to Caroline Baum, Margaret Throsby and Simon Longstaff for their assistance with this project, and to Nga Chu for her creative acumen.

Culture + Ideas Series proudly supported by Credit Suisse Private Banking.

Thank you to Johnnie Walker, A.R.T., Tokyo, for his wise and sensitive advice.

Heartfelt thanks and deep appreciation to Nicholas Curtis AM and Angela Curtis for their generous support of SCAF and Dinh Q. Lê’s practice.

Zoe Butt thanks Gene and Brian Sherman for the opportunity to work with SCAF, and the staff of SCAF for their brilliant expertise.

Thanks also to Cuong Nguyen and Sandrine Llouquet for building erasurearchive.net, to The Propeller Group for their friendship and patience, and to Suhanya Raffel, Christopher Myers and family for their unerring belief and support.

Dinh Q. Lê would like to express particular thanks to Gene and Brian Sherman for their vision; to Nicholas Curtis AM and Angela Curtis for their faith in him; to the staff of SCAF for their support, particularly Dolla S. Merrillees and Amanda Henry; to Zoe Butt for her valuable discussion and contribution to the formulation of this project; to The Propeller Group for their assistance in realising his ideas; to Ngo Minh Hao for always being there; and to his mother for making the courageous decision to cross the South China Sea with her children in search of freedom.

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Thanks as always to Brian Sherman for his focused, passionate and unwavering support of SCAF’s activities.

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Jitish Kalat: Aquasaurus 25 October – 20 December 2008

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The View from Elsewhere 19 March – 13 June 2009 Presented in partnership with the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

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Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA 3 July – 26 September 2009

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Charwai Tsai: Water, Earth and Air 23 October – 19 December 2009

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Fiona Tan: Coming Home 19 March – 12 June 2010 Presented in association with the National Art School, Sydney

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Brook Andrew: The Cell 29 July – 18 September 2010 Presented in association with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane On tour to IMA, 25 September – 20 November 2010; MONA FOMA, Hobart, 14 – 20 January 2011; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, NZ, 12 March – 6 June 2011; PICA, Perth, 9 July – 21 August 2011

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Contemporary Art for Contemporary Kids 8 October – 18 December 2010 Presented in partnership with the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

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Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge 18 March – 4 June 2011 On tour to IMA, Brisbane, 2 July – 13 August 2011

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Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 8 July – 10 September 2011

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Co-curated by Zoe Butt and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Published by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16-20 Goodhope Street Paddington NSW 2021 ABN 25 122 280 200 sherman-scaf.org.au

©

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Copyright in the text is held by the authors.

Copyright in the images is held by the artist.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright. However, should any infringement have occurred, the publishers tender their apologies and invite copyright owners to contact them.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-inPublication entry Author: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Title: Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure; prepared by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation ISBN: 978-0-9807763-1-7 (pbk) Subjects: Lê, Dinh Q., 1968 – Exhibitions.

Installations (Art).

Art, Modern – 21st century.

Other Authors/Contributors: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Dewey Number: 709.04074

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Chairman, Executive Director Dr Gene Sherman AM Associate Director Amanda Henry General Manager – Artistic and Educational Programmes Dolla S. Merrillees Executive Assistant to Gene Sherman Laura Brandon Communications and Events Coordinator Aaron de Souza Administration Assistant Danielle Devery

Exhibition and Catalogue Management Dolla S. Merrillees and Amanda Henry Advisory Board Andrew Cameron, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts, Michael Whitworth National and International Art Adviser Anna Waldmann Communications Adviser Michael Young Design Mark Gowing Design Editor Fiona Egan Typeset in Akkurat Mono Printed in Australia by Ligare Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is a notfor-profit organisation providing a platform for innovative visual artists primarily from Asia, Australia and the Pacific Rim. All donations over $2 are tax deductible and will support our exhibition, educational, public and artist-in-residence programmes.

– Cover: Erasure, 2011 Installation view, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2011 Courtesy the artist and SCAF Photo: Jacob Ring

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