Art and human rights by Caroline Turner Jen Webb

Author:Caroline Turner, Jen Webb [Caroline Turner, Jen Webb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Art & Politics, Political Science, Human Rights, History, Social History
ISBN: 9781526100726
Google: AW25DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-01-01T02:57:12+00:00

Dinh Q. Lê: Art and affirmation

Dinh Q. Lê’s art and life need to be seen as transnational in focus. Like Shimada, Weerasinghe and Harsono, Dinh Q. Lê’s art is related to collective memory and to history. Like Harsono he wishes to present a different view of history for the benefit of current and future generations but in a transnational context that includes US understandings of the Vietnam War.

Born in 1968 in Vietnam, Lê and his family went to the United States as refugees in 1979, escaping from the 1978 incursions of the Khmer Rouge into Vietnam. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then in 1992 was awarded a Masters of Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Like many artists discussed in this book, his work has been shown in major international exhibitions. These include the Venice Biennale (2003), the Asia Society in New York (2005), the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane (2006), the Gwangju Biennale (2006), Thermocline of Art ZKM, Germany (2007), the Singapore Biennale (2008), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010), and Documenta 13 in Germany (2012). His art contains within it his own memories of being a ten-year-old boy in 1978, fleeing across the sand with his mother and siblings, gunfire behind them, desperately trying to escape to freedom. It includes the boat voyage, the refugee camp in Southern Thailand, and then the experience of arriving in Los Angeles as a refugee, still unable to speak English.87

Lê returned to Vietnam in 1993, shortly after graduating. He visited the family grave, and decided to settle in the country permanently in 1997, despite some reservations in Vietnam about those who had returned after being educated abroad, and despite the fact that his mother and siblings did not accompany him. His life experiences, including censorship in Vietnam, led him in 2007 to establish with other artists an independent artist-run exhibition space, Sàn Art, in Ho Chi Minh City, for the benefit of artists whose work had been overlooked by political and commercial systems in Vietnam. He also founded the Vietnamese Foundation for the Arts. Much funding for the space and the Foundation comes from the west. In 2010 Lê was awarded the Prince Claus Laureate Prize (from the Netherlands) for his work supporting the local community in Vietnam.

One critical impetus of his art for many years seems to have been his concern that American memories of the Vietnam War elided its effects on the Vietnamese. As he has stated, ‘I wanted to give the Vietnamese the voices to speak.’88 This was a feature of his first public art work. While still a student in the US, Lê took a course on the Vietnam War which was taught in a manner that stressed the sufferings of Americans and, he said, ‘perpetuated the American point of view. I became frustrated. Their suffering during the War is incomparable to that of the Vietnamese people.’89 His response was to produce the work Accountability, a series of

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