He's been on our minds since Duc of Tadioto hosted a talk a few weeks ago on the leading contemporary Vietnamese artists. They talk was fabulous by the way, with lively conversation in English and Vietnamese; we're definitely looking forward to the next one. Before we get treated to another dose of Duc and debate though, here is Holland Cotter on Dinh Q. Le at MoMA.
In slumberous mid-August thousands of visitors fidget and drift through the Museum of Modern Art, finding almost everything worth photographing and almost nothing worth more than a point-and-shoot glance. But in one gallery — basically a wide glorified corridor — people tend to stop, focus, even settle down in front of a three-channel video by the Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Le projected across a long wall.Titled “The Farmers and the Helicopters,” the video is partly and spectacularly about the Vietnam War. We first see a panning shot of forests and rice paddies in aerial view. Then helicopters arrive, swarming, landing, lifting off, buzzing and shuddering through the sky, spewing men and rockets, crashing explosively, then rising to buzz some more. Classic shock and awe.
Interspersed with these noisy scenes are recent interviews with Vietnamese people. A former Vietcong soldier recalls how, more than 40 years ago, he shot at an American chopper to make it go away, and it did. A woman describes her first sight of an American helicopter around the same time. She was so disconcerted as it hovered over her that she could only look up at the pilot and smile.
A younger man, a self-taught mechanic named Tran Quoc Hai, speaks of his lifelong infatuation with such flying machines. He says that after studying old examples in Vietnam war museums and doing some Internet research he teamed up with a farmer friend and built a helicopter from scratch, for commercial use, but also to serve as a positive symbol of his country in the contemporary world.
As it happens, we can see this symbol firsthand; it’s installed in a gallery next to where the video is playing. And the two pieces constitute Mr. Le’s solo show, part of MoMA’s Projects series. Mr. Le was born in 1968 in South Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. The war that the Vietnamese call the American war was at full bore, though he has few personal memories of it. He does have memories, traumatic ones, of Khmer Rouge soldiers invading his hometown a decade later, at which point his family fled to Thailand and on to the United States.
They ended up in Southern California, where Mr. Le studied art, eventually earning an M.F.A. in New York City. In 1993 he returned to Vietnam for the first time and soon decided to stay. He now lives in Ho Chi Minh City, though, like many artists with thriving careers, he travels a lot.
In the 1990s Mr. Le became known internationally for ingeniously formatted photographic work that addressed his bicultural history. To create that work he gathered various kinds of pictures — family snapshots, outtakes from 1960s news documentaries, stills from Hollywood war films — and reprinted them all at the same size. He then cut the prints into thin strips and, using a traditional Vietnamese technique for making grass mats, wove the strips into composite images, in which real and fictional, personal and political, Vietnamese and American overlapped and coexisted.
As time went on, and postwar Vietnam became a tourist destination, he wove in corporate logos and references to Southeast Asian pop culture. The art that resulted was the product of sharp, complex critical thinking, about an Asian war whose history had been written almost exclusively by the West, about an Asian culture with which the West was for a time intimately and violently engaged, but about which it knew almost nothing.
Obviously there was fuel for a polemic here. For the most part Mr. Le steered clear of that, offering instead a distanced view of a cultural history that he had been born into, but, as an immigrant living away from it, had absorbed secondhand and primarily from an American perspective.
The MoMA exhibition, organized by Klaus Biesenbach and Cara Starke, is an extension and expansion of the photographic montage. The medium has changed, but the weaving continues. The video, with its rhythmically alternating images of past and present, is very much a woven thing. So, in its clunky, jerry-built way, is Mr. Tran’s life-size helicopter.
Assembled from recycled scraps — a car seat, some tractor wheels, an engine salvaged from a Russian truck — it doesn’t look sleekly sky-worthy, especially if compared to the Bell-47D1 helicopter that has long been a fixture of MoMA’s design department. But it works, sort of. In an early test flight it lifted six feet off the ground. Its performance has improved since, but, more significantly, Mr. Tran’s project has gained wide popular notice in Vietnam, where it is viewed as emblematic of the country’s effort to move beyond the devastating war and forge something constructive from its heritage. Many Westerners have yet to see Vietnam in this changed light. For them it is still a place defined by a war. And that war, though fought on Southeast Asian soil, remains very much a Western event: our war, our drama, our tragedy, our history, which may be one reason that MoMA audiences are so enthralled by the video.
Mr. Le is well aware of this proprietary attitude and takes steps in his video — on which he collaborated with two Vietnamese artists, Phu-Nam Thuc Ha and Tuan Andrew Nguyen — to shake it up. When first seeing the work’s war scenes, we assume we’re watching authentic documentary footage. Some of it is, indeed, authentic; but much is lifted from commercial films set during the Vietnam War.
Awareness of the discrepancy can be unsettling. Even when we know we’re dealing with two different species of filmed reality, we may not be able, in practice, to distinguish examples of one kind from the other. So we’re just left with doubt. And suddenly it’s hard to know how to react to anything we’re seeing.
In a video interview an older women describes how, during an air attack decades earlier, she tried to camouflage herself by tying branches to her body. Her comment is immediately followed by a surveillance-style view of someone hiding in tall grass that is churned up by propeller wind. Is this an illustrative clip from a documentary or from a movie?
And what’s the reality quotient in a quick, blurry shot, taken from above, of a man who makes little beseeching bows as he holds up a child, like an offering, to an ascending helicopter? It would be comforting to take this heartbreaking vignette for a cinematic invention, though it probably isn’t.
Uncertainty is the right attitude to bring to the study and writing of history. And it is, on the whole, the one Mr. Le brings to his art, and notably to his remarkable video, with its visually tight and ideologically porous weave of fact and fiction, memory and illusion, with the elements of each pair in constant, volatile interchange.
And certainty, in some measure, has its place too. In the guise of positive thinking, it has served Mr. Tran and his collaborator in a D.I.Y. helicopter enterprise well. That the first product of their labor is now on display in New York may be taken as proof. And that it is specifically at MoMA is the result of further certainty: the museum is sure enough of the strength and value of Mr. Le’s art to have acquired the contents of his current show — gripping images, overhauled histories, Vietnamese voices — for its permanent collection.
Taken from The New York Times, August 12, 2010
Works by Nguyen Van Phuc, Nguyen Huy An, Nguyen Tran Nam and Vu Hong Ninh. Photographs by Ehrin Macksey.
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