in 2022 Much of Lê's work explores "the narrative of loss" and the traumas of war. Having grown up in the U.S. and seeing Western-centric portrayal of Vietnam, Lê's works often focus on unheard stories, revealing "a more complex understanding of Vietnamese identity – beyond that of an extra in American war movies". Initially, Lê "really tried to suppress the memories," before watching these films. Lê casts "a critical eye on the role of the media and photography in constructing biased narratives of the Vietnam War," and "shreds historic photographs and interlaces the pieces" to create "tapestries that tell a different story". 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.
Photo-weaving and photograph-based works 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, an approach which Lê describes "were really about me trying to locate my place in America, in the West".
Mot Coi Di Ve 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". 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."
The Scrolls Scrolls (2013) with digitally distorted images of Vietnam War:
Thich Quang Duc, a monk who self-immolated in protest against the treatment of Buddhists;
Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the girl photographed running naked after napalm bombs attack of her South Vietnamese village;
General Ngyuen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese national police commander executing a Viet Cong prisoner; and women and children in great distress after the massacre of civilians by US troops. These 127 x 5000 cm scrolls drape down the wall and collapse into stacked rolls, giving the installations a sculpture-like appearance. Lê’s use of a scroll evokes the traditions of Chinese landscape paintings, narrating "the cumulative story of an event by virtue of the length of the scroll on which it was painted, and reversing
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “precise moment.” For WTC in Four Moments, Lê created a four-channel video work with sound, depicting the World Trade Center in four stages: before, during, and after the collapse, and during the rebuilding. Lê first printed 200 metre-long stretched digital images, that he used to create a six minute video of each, removing "all iconic connotations associated with September 11th, leaving the viewer to reconsider the events as a slow progression of moments that led to a cataclysmic trauma and the newly built One WTC. as well as Hollywood stills of the wars and conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Crossing the Farther Shore Composed of thousands of images from Lê’s photographic collection, he creates seven seemingly weightless rectangular structures resembling the mosquito nets that refugees like Lê slept under in camps. Lê created what he calls “a sleeping, dreaming memory of Vietnam,” by stitching together canopies which "offers a new image of the country no longer stricken by conflict and war, but filled with love, possibility, and hope". a two-channel video made from splicing together scenes of
Martin Sheen and
Charlie Sheen as soldiers in Vietnam War movies
Platoon and
Apocalypse Now, filmed 7 years apart. The work "deconstructs and juxtaposes the performances" by uniting "father and son as actors to continually replay the trauma and futility of the Vietnam War". The collaborative installation with Phunam Thuc Ha and
Tuan Andrew Nguyen of
The Propeller Group, included a working helicopter built from scratch by Le Van Danh, a farmer, and Tran Quoc Hai, a self-taught mechanic. The installation transformed an object of war to "an object of hope, of resilience," For the Vietnamese public, it also symbolised the "urgent sense to move, to forward, up and to overcome". Lê later noted that, "his [Mr. Tran's] dream awoke other people, awoke the Vietnamese, because we've been working so hard to rebuilding the country, that, I think we forgot to dream," and by seeing the self-built helicopter, "people remembered what it's like to dream again". The installation was acquired for MoMA's permanent collection. As well as marking the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat in WWII, it was his first large-scale museum show in Asia,
Light and Belief / Ánh sáng Niềm tin (2012) Another of Lê's video exhibitions, "Light and Belief" (2012) ("Ánh sáng Niềm tin") commissioned by
dOCUMENTA (13), juxtaposed approximately 100 watercolors by Vietnamese soldiers commissioned as front-line artists during the war, with interviews that Lê conducted with them. The work includes a strong curatorial component, a shift in Lê's practice. and again at the Asia Society in 2017.
The Colony (2016) Lê filmed the islands from a boat, a bird's eye view and by using a drone for "The Colony" (2016), a five-channel video installation with three projections and two monitors. The Colony is the first of Lê’s film installations which does not directly reference the Vietnam War, and marks a significant development in his practice. Featuring newly filmed footage, based on a cluster of islands off the west coast of Peru, Lê’s narratives touch on aspects of the islands’ history including the nineteenth century imperial wars between Spain and its former colonies Peru and Chile; and the US Guano Act of 1856 that claimed over one hundred uninhabited islands, reefs and atolls in the Pacific and Atlantic. Lê notes that "it's not Vietnam War, but it's connected to Vietnam in many ways," and the individuals caught up in the currents of history remains as a central theme of The Colony. Lê noted, “it’s kind of similar to what China is doing in the South China Sea [...] The U.S. wanted guano, and the Chinese want control of the energy resources and waterways. It’s just history repeating itself.”
The Imaginary Country For his first video work, Lê explored the idea of departure, a crucial moment in the diaspora experience "when one leaves, sometimes abruptly and sometimes by force, to venture into the unknown," as well as the "sometimes difficult yet equally courageous act of return". Lê staged a pop-up exhibition kiosk in the Central Market in Ho Chi Minh City, with toys and clothing designed for conjoined twins, that questioned the "socially constructed perceptions of purity and impurity, of acceptance and rejection." In opting against the traditional gallery setting, Lê had arranged with a kiosk owner to use her store for a month. The kiosk setting created interactions and discussions between Lê and his audience, and "their interactions to serve as a replacement for the typical artist statement often seen in galleries or museums". and an exhibition in
Berlin, including "little plastic dolls with deformed bodies, pacifiers with two teats, and children's clothes with two collars, bearing the logos of the companies that produced Agent Orange," were described "the most expressive piece in the exhibition".
The Ties That Bind (2024) In what Lê described was a completely new challenge, he collaboratively created the quilt installation "The Ties That Bind" for Ichihara Lakeside Museum, working with Japanese, Vietnamese and people from various countries. The concepts of the installation were based on interviews Lê conducted that provided him with deeper understanding on people's connections and their longing for families back home. == Selected solo exhibitions ==