Memory is an elusive thing. On the one hand, our memories of key people and places make us who we are; and yet, the further our lives march forward in time, the fuzzier our past becomes. 

Acclaimed multimedia artist Dinh Q. Lê spent his career obsessed with this contradiction. Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodia border, Lê’s childhood was cut short by the Cambodian-Vietnamese War of the 1970s and the Vietnam War, which forced him and his family out of the country in 1978. After spending a year in Thailand, Lê’s family settled in Los Angeles. 

After receiving his BFA in photography from the University of California, Santa Barbara and MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York, Lê embarked on a career that would earn him recognition as “one of the world’s most visible Vietnamese contemporary artists,” by the Wall Street Journal. Before the age of 45, his work was exhibited in numerous biennials, triennials, and museums around the globe. Though Lê died of a stroke in his home in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2024, the impact and importance of his work lives on. 

This spring, Elizabeth Leach Gallery hosts Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995 – 2023 to examine and celebrate Lê’s three-decade career. Elizabeth Leach Gallery first presented Lê’s work in 1998 and was an important platform for some of his most experimental exhibitions, which meditated on a life lived between East and West, Buddhism, war, and photography as a medium. On view through April 26th, the exhibition brings together several bodies of the artist’s work that feature some of Lê’s earliest photo-weavings, which defined the work he completed while living in the U.S., as well as photo series and sculptures he completed after returning to Vietnam in the early aughts. 

In a 2021 studio visit with the Nguyen Art Foundation, Lê described the difficulties he faced in his early years as a Vietnamese-American artist, living and working in Southern California. “I was studying all this western art history, while a student at UCSB, and asking myself, what’s my place in the Western world?” he told interviewers. “When you’re living in America, you are constantly asked, ‘What is your place … within this white majority’?” 

Many of his earliest pieces work to unpack the complexities of Lê’s traumatic past, in order both to make sense of the experiences he left behind, but also to honor the parts of himself that might not make sense to a Western audience. 

In one of the earliest of Lê’s photo-weavings on view, Untitled (Tuol Sleng and Angkor Temple) (1998), the artist uses a traditional Vietnamese mat weaving technique Lê learned as a child to interlace the faces primarily of Cambodian children with a crest from Angkor Wat, a Hindu-Buddhist temple complex in Cambodia. As with so many of Lê’s photo-woven pieces, his attention to detail is mesmerizing. The more you spend time with this particular work, the more faces emerge from the temple’s facade. Meanwhile, Lê’s interest in juxtaposing conflicting ideas rewards any viewer interested in the histories that inform Lê’s practice.

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For example, Lê’s reference to the The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the artwork’s title clarifies that the faces in the artwork are victims of the Cambodian genocide, which resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979 (i.e., nearly 25% of Cambodia’s population). The massacres ended when the Vietnamese military invaded in 1978—the same year Lê and his family escaped Vietnam—and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime. To make sense of the second half of Lê’s title, the Angkor Temple in the foreground is located within the capital city of Khmer.

After he returned to Vietnam in the early 2000’s, Lê found that many of the major art institutions in his home country were government funded and largely conservative. “People like me have no place in that scene,” he told the Nguyen Art Foundation. For many years, he was also unable to exhibit in Vietnam without a government permit.

“I had a romantic notion that I was still [Vietnamese], but I was too Americanized,” Lê told The Brooklyn Rail in 2010. “I felt disconnected and lost but I kept returning again to Vietnam.”

His works on view from that period capture just how trapped he felt between two worlds, neither of which fully belonged to him. Selections of Lê’s photographs from Signs and Signals from the Periphery (2009) document individuals living on the margins in a rapidly changing Vietnam. 

In Gardens on the Move (2009), Lê captures an image of two large, uprooted trees resting on a pallet, which is attached to a motorcycle parked on the side of the road. The positionality of the image is clear: Lê took out his camera to capture a strange moment. To an American audience, the image is certainly strange. What’s interesting is that the image seems to have been strange to Lê, too. In the same moment his photographs are contemplating the oddities of modern-day Vietnam, it is also made clear that Lê does not yet himself feel a part of it.

His sculpture from the same body of work, The Infrastructure of Nationalism (2009), captures Lê in a moment of realization. To complete the sculptural assemblage, the artist attached a large bouquet of communist flags to the back of a bicycle. Not only does the work visualize the baggage many Vietnamese carry with them, day to day; but it also gestures toward their decades long struggle against communism in the country. In many ways, this struggle is the most important element of Lê’s childhood. In this sculpture, that struggle seems for Lê, for the first time, to make sense.

In his later works, both his self understanding and expansive worldview are in full bloom. Selections from his series Monuments and Memorials (2021) are more technically refined than his earlier experiments in photo-weaving. Cambodia Reamker #20 (2022), which fuses several mythical and natural images together with the artist’s portrait at its center, is perhaps the most striking. Here, his distinctive style has fully matured.Walking through Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995 – 2023, in fact, I got the sense that I was witnessing an artist grow into themselves in real time. Throughout his life, the themes Lê contemplated remained largely the same, even as the ways he went about contemplating them changed dramatically. In all, the exhibition left me wanting more, which I believe is a testament to Dinh Q. Lê’s tremendous talent, as well as his ability to instill wonder in his audience—both at the horrors of his people’s past and the possibilities of his nation’s future.

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Elizabeth Leach Gallery is located at 417 NW 9th Avenue in Portland. It is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 am-5:30 pm and by appointment. The exhibition Dinh Q Lê: A Survey 1995-2023 is open through April 26th.