Dinh Q. Lê reimagines histories of war, conflict, migration, and politics through photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, Vietnam, Lê and his family escaped the Khmer Rouge invasion of his hometown and fled to the United States in 1979. He rose to prominence in the early 1990s with a series of unique photo-weavings—interlaced strips of documentary photographs and stills from Hollywood war films in which fantasy and reality, personal and political, past and present, and Vietnamese and American overlap. Since moving back to Vietnam in 1997, he has used video and found photography to engage other Vietnamese perspectives, giving voice literally and metaphorically to those who have been marginalized by history.  

The largest solo exhibition in the United States in more than a decade to showcase the work of this internationally renowned artist, Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return entwines unknown or rarely heard first-person accounts of war and migration from people in North Vietnam, the Vietnamese diaspora, and refugees like Lê who have returned to live in their home country. Themes of departure and return, the role of the artist during times of war, symbols of American imperialism, and recent histories of Vietnam are explored through documentary videos and multichannel cinematic presentations, found photographs, artists’ war sketches, abstract paintings, floral photo-weavings, and oral histories. By weaving together these multilayered narratives, Lê reshapes the cultural imaginary and offers a promising vision of the future.

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return is the fourth exhibition in SJMA’s ongoing series “New Stories from the Edge of Asia,” which features work by artists from Pacific Rim countries and cultures who push the boundaries of narrative in contemporary art using experimental animation, video, film, gaming, and interactive technologies.