Stages of Memory: The War in Vietnam
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Internationally recognized artist Dinh Q. Le–born in Vietnam, raised in the United States, and now living in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon)–brilliantly addresses these questions in his series “Persistence of Memory,” which examines the way pop-culture images of Vietnam helped form his identity. The title comes from a Salvador Dali painting of the same name that combines representational images in surreal ways to reflect on the creative process. In Persistence of Memory #10 Le has woven a war-era black-and-white image of soldiers together with a colorful landscape from a Hollywood film about the Vietnam war, reflecting the commingling of his own real and imagined “memories.” The helicopters fighting wildfires near his California home, for example, reminded him of those he’d seen in Vietnam. Then he remembered there were never helicopters in his village–he was recalling scenes from Apocalypse Now. With its fragments intricately woven together in irregular patterns, this mosaiclike piece creates a visual experience that fluctuates–like Le’s memories–between sources, the black-and-white images burning through the more familiar cinematic scene.
One of the most powerful works in the show is Le’s video documentation of an installation/performance he did in the market in Ho Chi Minh City. For Damaged Gene Project he set up a stall that sold clothing for deformed children–monogrammed with the names of the chemical companies that produced defoliants–and toys like two-headed dolls. Dioxin, used in Agent Orange, still contaminates Vietnamese soil, and neither the U.S. nor the Vietnamese government acknowledges that since the war there’s been a thousandfold increase in the number of Vietnamese children born with birth defects. Damaged Gene Project confused and often repulsed the people in the market, but despite the cultural stigma of deformities, some revealed, when pressed, that they knew or were related to a child born with one.
Miller’s work may be intended as a transition between “Stages of Memory” and another exhibition on the museum’s first floor, Jeffrey Wolin’s “Inconvenient Stories.” But Wolin’s photographs of veterans and texts of interviews with them add nothing new to the tale of Vietnam, simply exploiting soldiers’ trauma without offering anything worthwhile artistically. The images are bland and uninventive, and though the narratives are compelling, they get lost amid all the others, just as Miller’s work does amid the Vietnamese-centered visions in “Stages of Memory.”
Price: Free
