Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995-2023
March 5 - April 26, 2025
First Thursday: March 6, 2025, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995 - 2023, an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Dinh Q. Lê (1968 - 2024). This is the gallery’s first exhibition of Lê’s work since his untimely passing in April of 2024. Spanning the artist’s three-decade career, this exhibition brings together several bodies of his work and features photographs, photo-weavings, and sculpture made between 1995 and 2023.
Elizabeth Leach Gallery first presented Lê’s work in 1998 and was an important platform for some of his most experimental exhibitions. At a remove from the critical audience of New York, these exhibitions were meditations on a life lived between East and West, Buddhism, war, and photography as a medium. With his singular voice and incisive vision, Lê developed an artistic practice concerned with the mutability and insolvability of self-identity, memory, and the historical record.
This exhibition features several of Lê’s signature photo-weavings from multiple discrete bodies of work, including an example from his infamous From Vietnam to Hollywood series (2003 - 2005). These distinctive works are known for the juxtaposition of conflicting images and ideas, and are made with traditional Vietnamese mat weaving techniques that the artist learned as a child. Angkor temples are paired with interior views of Tuol Sleng (Monuments and Memorials, 2021), Khmer Rouge prisoners with murals from the Cambodian Royal Palace at Phnom Penh (Cambodia Reamker, 2023), and western product logos and Hollywood film stills with Buddhist and Communist symbols (From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage, 2007).
Also featured are photographs and sculptures from a lesser-known body of work, Signs and Signals from the Periphery (2009). Responding to the challenging years of 2008 and 2009, this group of works demonstrates how people living on the margins in a rapidly changing Vietnam communicated and marked their place in the world. Bicycle tires, DVDs, and bricks with paper funnels signify the availability of bicycle repairs, pornography, and fuel.
Over the course of Dinh Q. Lê’s career, his work was exhibited in numerous international biennials, triennials, and museums. Before the age of forty-five, Dinh’s work was featured at the Venice Biennale (2005), the Asia Society (2005; 2017; 2021), the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006), the Gwangju Biennale (2006), the Singapore Biennale (2006; 2008), the Vancouver Biennial (2009), the 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2009), the Museum of Modern Art (2010), the Busan Biennale (2010), the Kiev Biennial (2012), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), the Carnegie International (2013), the Mori Art Museum (2015; 2017), and the Musée du quai Branly (2020; 2022), among other major museum exhibitions.
Dinh's work is included in the collections of the Tate Modern, the Mori Museum, the Asia Society, the Carnegie Museum, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and numerous other museum and institutional collections.
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is honored to have had the opportunity to work closely with Dinh Q. Lê and is proud to continue to support his legacy.
Dinh Q. Lê (1968 - 2024) created conceptually based multimedia work that reflects on the complex history of Vietnam, issues of war, displaced populations and how non-western cultures are depicted in western media. Lê had a solo exhibition in 2022 at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, France, and in 2018 at the San Jose Museum of Art. In July of 2015, Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum presented a retrospective of his work. Exhibiting internationally for 25 years, Lê’s work was shown in the 2013 Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, PA), dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, Germany), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), Kiev Biennial (Kiev, Ukraine), a Projects 93 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and a critically acclaimed one-person exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. Lê’s work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Ford Foundation (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia), Singapore Art Museum, and the Zabludowicz Collection (London, England).