Dinh Q. Lê
born 1968, in Hà Tiên, Vietnam; died 2024, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Dinh Q. Lê was a leading avant-garde artist from Vietnam. He was a co-founder of Sàn Art, one of Vietnam’s most important independent contemporary art platforms. As a Viet Kieu artist, Lê was interested in the role of memory in relation to personal and societal trauma, especially in the wake of the American-Vietnam War. Lê often merged traditional culture and individual accounts with historical events to acknowledge the subjectivity of historical narratives. His work memorializes the innocent casualties affected by international border wars and governmental policymaking. Lê is best known for creating fragmented imagery in his large-scale photo collages. They appropriate photographs depicting glamorized images of the Vietnam War, cut and woven together using traditional Vietnamese basket-weaving techniques.
