Titled “Cambodia: Splendor and
Darkness,” the series comprised photographic portraits of victims of the Khmer
Rouge regime woven together with shots of the exquisite wall carvings at Angkor
Wat.
“There are certain bodies of work you’ve
done, you feel it’s completed and you let it go, and some others that stay with
you. I think this body was kind of, maybe haunting is not the word, but I
always felt it was not complete; for a variety of reasons. At the time, I was
only using photography, which had a lot of limitations; I really hate the
glossy surface of photography, its plastic feel, and I always felt this body of
work needs to be completely matt, because matt surfaces have a more tactile
feel,” the artist explains.
With “Monuments and Memorials,” a new
exhibition currently showing at STPI Creative Workshop in Singapore, the artist
is revisiting this series, bringing it to a new level with the use of matt and
silver paper, while also breaking new ground with mural-sized prints and his
first paper sculptures.
“I wanted to use silver paper because in
Cambodia there is this very interesting practice of offering (pieces of) gold
and silver leaf in temples, and there is also a Silver Pagoda in Phnom Penh
inside the Royal Palace, which has silver tiles inlaid and many objects in
silver,” he explains adding that working at STPI he has been able to print his photographs
on a silver surface that gives the work an interesting holographic aspect that
he had not expected.
While the works have a beautiful
aesthetic, the subject matter is highly complex and only slowly emerges as the
viewer studies the details. “With Lê’s works, it’s not about the first impression.
One has to really look closely to be able to read and understand his work. It’s
a lot more than the surface and his beautiful use of silver foil and Cyanotype,”
explain Emi Eu, Director of STPI.
Issues of identity, memory and history
are central themes in the Vietnamese artist’s practice which digs into his own
cross-cultural and past experiences to find inspiration, weaving these into his
photomontage tapestries, as well as more recent videos.
With their hometown under attack from
the Khmer Rouge, Lê’s family fled South Vietnam and spent a year in a Thai refugee
camp before finally being able to migrate to the US, first to Oregon, then
California. His father died before Lê made his escape and his three older siblings
were arrested while trying to flee, so Lê spent much of his adolescence trying
to suppress many tragic memories: “We kicked in survival mode. It was very much
about forgetting as much as we could, so we could move on, adapt,” he recalls.
Years later, in his third year at the
University of California in Santa Barbara, he switched to art (having found
computer sciences boring) and it was while he was still an undergraduate that
he first started to use weaving in his work. As a young child Lê had observed
his aunt weaving grass table mats that would be exported to Eastern Europe, and
while he was reflecting on his own identity in relation to the USA and the
notion of interweaving cultures, he created his first series weaving his
self-portraits with images of Renaissance paintings that he was studying: “What
I like about weaving is that it’s not something that meshes perfectly, you
force the strands together, so they exist together, but separately at the same
time; as opposed to the technique of superimposing, which is often used in
photography and makes different photos blend perfectly.”
Over the years, his technique of cutting
photographs into strips and then weaving these strips together to compose a new
picture has evolved to become freer and more spontaneous: “The pattern dictates
how to work with the image, but you basically have to control two images and
it’s important to keep some of the key features of the portraits, like the eyes,
the nose, the mouth, the outline of the face, then for the rest it’s how the
two interact,” the artist explains.
Lê created “Cambodia: Splendor and
Darkness” after visiting the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh — which was once a
gruesome prison where 17,000 people were incarcerated, tortured and killed
under the Khmer Rouge regime — and then Angkok Wat. He was struck by the sharp
contrast between the enlightenment of the Khmer Empire when Angkor Wat was
built and the darkest age of Cambodia’s history eight centuries later. “I found
it hard to reconcile the two eras. There was such a contradiction that it
really became something I was obsessed about. At the same time I was reading a
book that talked about how we have a tendency to build monuments but rarely
build memorials. So for me weaving the Khmer Rouge’s victims into the monuments
is a way of undermining these monuments, while remembering this most recent
past,” he explains.
The beautiful aesthetic of the work is
deliberate. “We have a tendency not to look at things we don’t want to see or
we don’t want to think about, like war images, death, destruction — not
something you would want to hang on your walls and live with. So how do you
make people remember, make people live with it? I think it’s important that the
work has a certain kind of beauty. Also, I’m somebody who came from so much
ugliness, I did not want this to take over what I do and let it control it.”
One of his other successful weaving
series, “From Vietnam to Hollywood,” wove photographs from Vietnam, some by
photojournalists, with stills from Hollywood films — Apocalypse Now, Born On
The 4th of July, The Deer Hunter — allowing Lê to reflect on the differences
between reality and fiction, trying to reconcile his own memories of his native
land with those inherited from popular culture he had experienced living in the
USA.
Since the mid-2000s, Lê moved away from
photography to focus on video work and installations – such as his 2006 “The
Farmers and the Helicopters” installation which was shown at the Singapore
Biennale then at MoMA in New York and comprised a three-channel video
interlacing Vietnamese recollections of the war with clips from Western films,
along with a model helicopter hand built from scrap parts by a Vietnamese farmer
and a mechanic.
The latest works for STPI have reignited
his interest in weaving photographs and encouraged the adoption of new
techniques such as his first 3D weaving created over a rattan form and using
images of protests from around the world, a work Lê points out was inspired by
the plight of migrants trying to enter Southern Europe by boat, which is a
tragedy that brings back painful childhood memories. Suspended from the ceiling
the pieces look like asteroids floating in space, “I think that we are all
sitting on a rock and floating in this dark universe,” he says.
“I’m definitely going to continue with
this. I love this direction,” Lê says, adding “For this project the rocks are
hanging, but for the next project, I’d like to have rocks on the floor. I’m
visually imagining a room full of these rocks; I think it would be very
beautiful.”
First published in PRESTIGE SINGAPORE (May edition)
First published in PRESTIGE SINGAPORE (May edition)