From Vietnam to Hollywood

P·P·O·W is pleased to present a one-person exhibition of artworks by Dinh Q. Lê. The exhibition will contain Lê's well known series of photo-weavings, included in the 50th Venice Biennale "Delays and Revolutions" (2003) exhibition. More recently completed artworks that continue Lê's photo-weaving technique will be exhibited here, together with a larger wall installation of multiple photographs.

The photo-weavings mesh stills from well known Hollywood films about the Vietnam War with found images of unidentified Vietnamese people from that time. The resulting work poses a dense and dazzling visual energy that, according to Art Historian Lucy Lippard, "weaves multiple strands of identity and experience, history and memory, mythology and reality, conflict and resolution. In a uniquely disciplined collage form, he illuminates the complex interactions of his two homelands -- Vietnam and the United States. Apparent contradictions are transformed into visual ebb and flow, cultural give and take."

The exhibition will also contain a wall installation of collaged photographs in both black & white and color that investigates how photography mediates history for the present. The installation combines war era documentary photographs, found formal portraits of Vietnamese people taken at that time, images of contemporary Vietnam and blank light sensitive photographic papers whose images are latent and invisible, awaiting an imprimatur from the future to come.

Dinh Q. Lê was born in 1968 in Ha Tien, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodia border. Soon after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978, the Lê family immigrated to Los Angeles. After receiving a BFA from UC Santa Barbara, Lê began his first photo-weavings using a traditional technique he learned from his aunt. He continued, after earning his MFA from The School of Visual Art in New York, to develop art works that include installation, sculpture, video and urban intervention. Lê spends half the year in Vietnam where he produces much of his work, and the other half in Los Angeles.