Dinh Q. Lê: From Vietnam to Hollywood

Essay by Chris Miles. Interview by Mara Roth. Haunting and provocative, Dinh Q. Lê’s billboard-scale works interweave stills from Vietnamese films with war pictures, news photographs and archival documentary images. This interweaving is literal-the artist slices giant appropriated pictures into strips and then intermingles them as if they were the wicker used to make a basket or the rags used to make a rug, a reworking of traditional weaving techniques taught to him by his grandmother. The resulting photo collage has a pixilated quality but a handmade physicality and offers an overwhelmingly large-scale juxtaposition of images that fight and question and confuse one another.-Published in conjunction with Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and PPOW.