I contributed a dialogical essay, titled Make a Big Quilt Out of It”: How Art and History Interweave in Dinh Q. Lê’s Crossing the Farther Shore, for American Historical Review, Vol 128, Issue 4 in December 2023. In the essay, I detailed the conversation between me and late artist Dinh Q. Le, about his artistic coming-of-age in the US, his fateful return to Vietnam in the early 2000’s, and his political, but not politicized, approach to unpacking marginalized narratives in his historically iconoclast artworks.
Here is the blurb for the essay:
Dinh Q. Lê is an artist who is internationally known for his photo-weaving technique and mixed-media works that attempt to uncover and engage with sidelined histories of Vietnam. His practice has always been informed and implemented at the intersection of the three elements that compose many historical accounts: a memento, a site, and a dialogue. In his Crossing the Farther Shore, Lê enlists vernacular photographs from photo albums of South Vietnamese families who fled the country after 1975. He collected the photographs himself when he first returned to Vietnam in the late 1990s. In Crossing the Farther Shore, he weaves them into cube-shaped quilts that are suspended like mosquito nets in the exhibition space. This interview-format essay came out of a conversation at Lê’s studio in Ho Chi Minh City, where we discussed his thought process behind the installation of this series where old photographs play the role of both historical witnesses and fictive agents in a silent quest for justice.
