CEPA: ReLocating Asia Gallery

deSouza: Let me get a sense of the development of your work. Your first photo-weavings referred primarily to European painting...

Lê: Yes, I had a fascination with Western art. When I first came to the US in 1979, I couldn't speak much English. I spent a lot of time in the library but the only books I was interested in were the art books because they had pictures (laughs). There were a lot of books on Renaissance painting so I became interested in that.

Lê: Yes. But I also had a really weird experience in Vietnam when I was five or six. There was a Christmas parade [and I went to a Catholic Church] with an image of Christ. I was so scared, seeing this body hanging on a cross with blood dripping. So when I look at Renaissance painting it is with a morbid fascination, and when I started making art, I was drawn to those images. It was also about placing myself in relation to someone else's history and mythology.

deSouza: In your newer work, the references are recognizably South East Asian, and specifically Vietnamese or Cambodian. The most recurring motifs are a buddha's head and the recently familiar prison photographs of the Khmer Rouge regime. Can you talk about this shift and the new images?

Lê: Yes, the photographs are from a former Khmer Rouge prison I visited and which is now a museum. I've always been fascinated by the Khmer Rouge. When I was living in Vietnam, they invaded the town where I lived, and killed a lot of people. A kind of ethnic cleansing. Even today, I still don't know how they could do that, with their own people. The prison was just so horrifying. Then from there, I went to Angkor Wat. I was already in shock so it was so strange to see these amazingly beautiful, romantic temples. And yet I couldn't get the images of the prisoners out of my mind. Whatever I looked at, I saw their faces, constantly coming back to this horror. It was an extreme of emotions, and so the work is pretty much about the contrast between the two places, their contradiction and also their coexistence.

deSouza: They're very haunting, and yet have a strange familiarity. We already know the genre of captive photographs from police files, the concentration camps and also colonial history. And Angkor Wat has become almost a blueprint for Lost World fantasies --

deSouza: Right. And references always crop up in sci-fi movies. Also, at the entrance to the Bronx Zoo, there's a huge Angkor Wat head as an archway, and you have to walk through it to get to the Jungle World. On one hand we can keep a sense of humor about it, while at the same time being appalled. Regarding the prison photographs, I find them difficult to look at, that there is a voyeuristic quality as if I'm replaying their helplessness or subjugation and worse, knowing that the photographs were precursors to them being killed. Here, you've contextualized the photographs, but elsewhere I've seen them reproduced as artworks in their own right. How do you feel about that?

Lê: I did an installation last year about that, called The Quality of Mercy [for CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY]. I found the coffee-table book [The Killing Fields, eds. Riley, Christopher and Niven, Douglas. Twin Palms Press, 1997] really morbid. The editors talked about how if you look in these people's eyes you could try and see or relive what had happened. My point is that these people didn't know what was happening. A lot of them were children. Most didn't know why they were being arrested, why they were there. So, I rephotographed just their eyes, put the images in a black room so this slit of their eyes looked back at the viewer. In the middle of the room was a chair on its side, like a body lying down. I wanted the viewer to become the object of the gaze, almost asking us what happened.

Lê: Not so much that, I just wanted to reverse the position of being looked at. We're fascinated by them --

Lê: But now we seem to want more, as if seeing them could help us understand. The subject is so horrifying that we can't understand it. By looking at these portraits we try and make it real. We want something concrete to help us understand. My installation was to reverse all these things.

deSouza: Sure, photography is now so vital to memory, as a safeguard that the past will not be erased. With the Jewish holocaust, for example, photographs have become so central to the process of remembering, not necessarily privately, but certainly collectively. And ironically, we often rely, as with the Khmer Rouge, on the photographs taken by the murderers.

Lê: It's hard -- when do you objectify the victim, and when are you keeping that history, that memory alive? It's a fine line.

deSouza: Well, how do you approach that question when you make artwork? Are you trying to keep it open for the viewer to make those decisions or are you directing the viewer?

Lê: With this present body of work, I hope that I contextualize it so that it is no longer just about the prisoners, but about Cambodia itself, and also about my experience of being there.

deSouza: The Khmer Rouge and Angkor Wat are probably the only two things that most outsiders know about Cambodia. On one hand they become stereotypes, but I'm interested in how you've brought them together which makes them elusive, and yet evocative.

Lê: I'm also aware of the contradictions in Vietnam: there are the remains of the war, and yet you have beautiful scenery. That contradiction is so much, and in Cambodia it's magnified ten times. You can't escape it.

Lê: Yes, a demon, Kala, with a voracious appetite. It eats everything until there's nothing left, and finally it comes to Shiva, who is so angry that he orders the monster to swallow its own body. So there's just the head left and Shiva picks up the head and places it on a door. It's interesting how the revolution in Cambodia started essentially eating itself.

deSouza: I was just thinking how it becomes a metaphor for recent history. And also similar to your use of the headless buddha, which we'll talk about in a minute. Kala's head stands in for the whole body, becoming a synecdoche for the whole.

Lê: Also in the West we think of the head as the main element, and the body becomes useless. I find it interesting that people in Cambodia still pray to the headless buddhas.

Lê: At Angkor Wat there are rows and rows of headless buddha statues. The statues are too big to remove, so looters chop off just the heads to sell to tourists and collectors. Then they end up in collections and museums over here, like Los Angeles County Museum of Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The heads attain a new identity, becoming cultural rather than religious objects. In my installation I have a lightbox with a photograph of one of the headless statues. Facing it, on a museum-style pedestal, is a concrete replica of the missing head. There seems to be a dialogue between them. The piece is also about displacement, becoming like a self-portrait of me going back to Vietnam, looking for my former self.

deSouza: Have you tracked how any of the actual heads have ended up in museums?

Lê: That's something I want to do. The next time I'm in Cambodia I want to photograph the statues, then photograph the heads in collections here and do an installation about their relationship. I don't know how much the institutions here will allow me to critique them (laughs).

deSouza: I'm sure you'll find a way. The connotations of beheading, the headless body and the bodiless head, their potential dialogue between two geographical and cultural sites is quite astounding. Also your interest in museum acquisition and display, is that becoming more important to your work?

Lê: With the new work, especially the installations. But it's not so much an interest in museums, but in the history of the objects. And I'm moving more towards making three-dimensional objects. I'd definitely like to take a long break from weaving.

deSouza: I know that before this Cambodian series you had stopped weaving. What made you come back to it. It seems to be a process for literally melding contradiction, physically entwining them.

Lê: Yes, weaving seemed very appropriate for bringing together two images of one country or one history, even if those images were only in my mind.

deSouza: I remember you once saying that it was an aunt that taught you to weave.

Lê: Yes, my aunt used to do grass-mat weaving and when I was young I used to watch her and just learned how to do it over the years.

deSouza: So that becomes another way of placing it -- within a personal history. Something I noticed is how the patterns become pictorial devices to direct your eyes across the surface. Before you begin each piece, do you know how much of each image will come through and what the final image will look like?

Lê: I've been doing it for so long, that I have a pretty accurate sense of what it will look like. There are tricks in the weaving process to bring certain aspects out and keep others hidden. I used to use very elaborate patterns but they started getting in the way of the image. Now I simplify it and use a simple cross-pattern to hold down the woof, or the waft, or whatever you call it (laughs). When I went back to Vietnam, I asked my aunt and others to work with me on the weaving. They couldn't do it as the weaving I do is completely different now from how they do it. They work with fairly rigid pattern whereas my patterns are based on the images, on what I want to come through. They couldn't work that way. I gave up (laughing) after a while. It would have been interesting to have that input, but it just didn't work.

deSouza: That use of "assistants" raises interesting questions. On one hand it has a very colonial relationship, with artists like Clemente and Stephen Cox being criticized for their use of Indian artists to fabricate their work, whether miniature painters or temple sculptors. However, the artist also brings a different conceptual approach to what otherwise amounts to a rigidified process. What we have is the meeting of two different cultural and working methods, but the problem -- which is not necessarily the fault of the artists concerned -- is that such a meeting is already stacked, that it can rarely, if ever, take place as an equal encounter simply because of who gets the credit and the financial reward. You know, the outsider coming in, using this cheap labor in the same way as, say, a multinational company. Then, recently we have artists from the different diasporas going back to their countries of origin and using the same labor sources. Is this, or can this be a different relationship?

Lê: I hope there is a difference between me and someone else coming in. Maybe there isn't (laughing). But I learn from these people, so they are my teachers and I feel that my work is also part of their craft, that part of my work belongs to them.

deSouza: You're definitely going to be read differently -- as a Vietnamese artist -- rather than simply as An Artist. Your work will be read critically that way.

Lê: Yes, always as a minority artist, and using what is seen as an ethnic technique.

deSouza: I know in Britain for example, in the early '80s, a number of African and Asian artists were using batik in quite astounding ways, as a form of commentary and documentation of contemporary events. It was never really taken seriously since critically, it couldn't escape the stigma of being a "craft" and not a legitimate art practice.

Lê: That's one of the pitfalls. I think my work doesn't have such an ethnic label. It's able to cross certain borders because, essentially, I'm using photography. The technique of weaving is old, but the medium is contemporary. That jarring of difference is able to bring it into an art acceptance. My work has also been reprinted in Fiber Arts magazine and I've been included in a quilt show, as well as photography and painting shows. I'm glad it can cross those boundaries.

deSouza: That's exciting and liberating when you can draw on those heritages or histories which you feel are available to you, and still escape those stereotypical readings.

Lê: But I escape it only to a certain extent. I still get, oh, he's that Vietnamese guy who learned to weave from his aunt. I'm still located that way.

deSouza: Do you think that the recent imagery, the Buddha for example, will affect the reception of the work? You could be accused of just going back to your roots -- as if that was necessarily a bad thing.

Lê: What I find interesting is that a lot of people here have a problem with the Christian imagery in my earlier work. They see it as too religious, whereas I see it as an icon.

Lê: Yes. And with the new work, collectors are more interested because of the buddha. They see it as an icon, whereas for me it is more religious, more personal.

deSouza: I wonder if, from their points of view, there's a level of exoticism'

Lê: There is an element of that, but also a lot of people who buy my work these days are Western Buddhists (laughs).

deSouza: Which opens up a whole can of worms which I don't think I even want to get into (laughing). The recent work also includes self-portraits and portraits of family members.

Lê: Yes, my mother and nephew. Including me, the images essentially cover three generations.

deSouza: In one of your pieces which is organized almost as a triptych, your nephew is overlaid with the image of a crucifixion, and the two side images, of your and your mother's faces, are overlaid with buddha heads. The closeness of the two faces to the picture plane lends them an iconic quality similar to the bodiless buddha head we talked about earlier, and also suggesting relocation from an original site. It's interesting to see that recurrence, but in this very familial, almost intimate piece. I don't want to over-read this piece, but it seems that the crucifixion and the buddha heads locate your nephew in one geographic and cultural space, and your mother and yourself in another. Was that intentional?

Lê: Yes. My nephew is the first generation born here, the first Asian American. I'm fascinated by that. We don't know whether he will be totally Americanized or how he will be affected by Christianity.

deSouza: So, born here, he won't be able to draw upon a directly-experienced Vietnamese history.

deSouza: Talking to you, your work really begins to make sense almost as a form of documentation of where you are, physically and psychically, whether in Vietnam or here living with your family. The elements immediately around you come into the work, almost in a diaristic form.

deSouza: I think that mix of personal investment, the exploration of much broader issues in complex ways, as well as the sheer visual pleasure, is what makes your work so interesting for me. You've told me earlier that you divide each year between Vietnam and here, how does that work for you as an artist?

Lê: There's a certain energy in Vietnam which I don't get here. When I'm here, I'm constantly juggling with my identity, but when I'm there, it's the superficial things to a certain extent, like you walk out the door and you look the same as everyone else. There's a certain comfort in that. But also, it enables me to stand back and look at America in a whole different light. And when I'm here, I do the same with Vietnam. For the last couple of years, I've spent six months at a time in each country. That definitely has a big influence on the way I'm thinking and working now. Also, economically it makes sense for me. I couldn't afford to make the work I do, if I just stayed in the US.

Lê: I do here, but not there unfortunately. There's a stubbornness on the part of the artists to looking at new things.

Lê: Partly that. Also there's that feeling of, "You think you're better than us coming from the West." I understand that feeling but it makes it difficult, so I don't have much contact with artists there. But painters seem to appreciate the work more than photographers. One photographer said to me that if her work was shredded like mine, she would cry.

deSouza: Well, I can think of a lot of photographers here who would have the same reaction (laughing). I can see their point. Your work--with its overlays, and manipulation of the material and picture surface--does function more like painting. It's adulterated, as if you're working between mediums. Similar to the position of working between nationalisms, as it were; at home in each place, yet perceived as being too contaminated by the other place. Such issues are increasingly pressing as more artists live this dual existence. I wish we had time to discuss it more, but I'm afraid we've come to the end of our time. Dinh, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks.

Allan deSouza was a participating artist in "Uncommon Traits: Re/Locating Asia" Part I. This interview, which has been slightly modified from the original, was conducted in January 1998 in conjunction with the Dinh Q. Lê exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, "The Headless Buddha", February 6- March 20. A full color catalogue featuring the full interview and images from the exhibition is available through LACPS for $10; 6518 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028. (213) 466-6232. CEPA wishes to thank LACPS for its generosity in sharing this resource.

Dinh Q. Lê attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and completed his BA in Fine Arts in 1989. In 1990 Lê moved to New York to attend the graduate program in the School of Visual Arts and got his MFA in Photography in 1992. He was awarded a Fellowship by the Aaron Siskind Foundation in 1992; a Fellowship by Art Matters Inc. in 1992; a Fellowship in Photography by the NEA in 1994; a Dupont Fellowship in 1994; and a grant by the Gunk Foundation to create a public project in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 1998. During the last couple of years Le has travelled to Cambodia, spent four to six months each year in Vietnam. While not in Asia, he has been living and working in NYC and Southern California.

Lê has been awarded a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's Artist Residency Program grant. He will be making new work in CEPA's Imaging Facility and conducting a workshop in conjunction with the CEPA Education Program during March 1998.