Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê has built up a rich and complex body of work since the 1990s, using a variety of techniques that places great emphasis on photography. And yet Dinh Q. Lê is not your typical photographer. For him, images represent a means of questioning, splicing and transforming.

About the exhibition

Dinh Q. Lê designs installations using vernacular photographs and produces hybrid images blending diverse photographic styles. The technique he uses to intertwine images is inspired by watching his aunt weave mats.

By applying it to weave images, Dinh Q. Lê combines two registers of representation to produce a new image, a blend of the two, the vision of which he irreversibly distorts.

Voice plays an important role in the artist’s interests. Enabling it, making it audible, and reconstituting the complexity of history through those who have lived it, is a recurring element in his work. Although several of his works seek to offer different images and experiences of Vietnam (Light and Belief), others have recently explored the history of Cambodia and the representation of the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime. The series Splendor and Darkness interweaves portraits of victims and bas-reliefs of Angkor Vat. More recent works (Adrift in Darkness) use images of migrants and reflect on the tragedies of crossing the Mediterranean.