Theatre Journal

The back cover of this issue depicts a detail from Dinh Q. Lê’s Adrift in Darkness (2017), which consists of three rock-like sculptures suspended from the ceiling at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, where the artist had a solo exhibition in 2022. The works seemed to float like asteroids, suggesting conditions of existence beyond human experience. For me, their prominence in the exhibition conjured thoughts of aliens and ecologies at the limits of human survivability. Such visualizations help to introduce ideas of what we can and cannot see as well as processes of endurance, two themes that ran throughout Lê’s installation Photographing the Thread of Memory. Upon closer inspection, the material composition of the hanging art pieces became evident: strips of black and white photographs woven together. This practice of weaving together pictures from moving and still photography in order to create a new montage of chromogenic prints is the hallmark of Lê’s practice. Adrift in Darkness specifically references in Lê’s words, “the images of people packed so tightly on a rickety old boat, floating in the middle of a dark ocean.”² The intertwined portraits layer and add texture to the contemporary “protests and refugees from all over the world” depicted even as the overall structure fragments any individual portrayal.³ Lê challenges the viewer to envisage personhood in this mediated environment. That challenge remains central to discursive and material constructions of the refugee in general.

Although the pendulous objects were the most voluminous, the show featured several pieces from his oeuvre of woven filmic collages. Indeed, the exhibition highlighted several examples from Lê’s various series over the years including From Vietnam to Hollywood (2003-), probably his best known set of works. Taken from this collection, the front cover is Untitled (Milano 002). In the center, one can discern the Columbia Pictures logo: the “torch lady” Jenny Joseph by photographer Kathy Anderson. Underneath the central subject, splinters of the words “PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT” appear and provide the context to infer the script of “COLUMBIA” in the background. The herald of a famous Hollywood corporation, the torch lady is flanked by what would seem to be a wedding photo of an Asian couple on one side and, on the other, two more Asian women—one recumbent in robes and the other upright, wearing perhaps a khan dong (a Vietnamese headdress). The photographic tapestry also includes parachutes and war machines. Here the artwork invites performance from the spectator to apprehend the image and its constituent parts; the beholder must move back and forth to process the disparate visual elements. What are the links between Vietnam and the American film industry? What does the entwining of national and commercial forces do to our capacity to perceive always mediated images and how do we react to them? [End Page xiii]

Lê’s craft, which adapts the grass weaving techniques he learned as a child, both deconstructs the archive of Hollywood hegemony and asks his spectators to encounter a fragmented picture. Scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen notes that, unlike “romantic, bourgeois, and modernist notions of art,” craft is “not an isolated activity in society’s division of labor but instead exists as an everyday practice with an everyday function.”⁴ Within the context of the particular French museum in which Lê’s exhibition took place, craft traditions from various cultures constitute perhaps the majority of the displays. In this context, Lê’s art installation points to the tradition of past practices but also to their future. The works he produces are of a certain scale (the cover image is 97 x 183 cm) and offer partial records of either what was or what was desired from the perspective of vernacular photography, on one hand, and commercial cinema, on the other. The process to bring these perspectives together takes time. Lê’s hands painstakingly shape shards of memory into a meditative relief that queries the legacies of the American Wars in Southeast Asia. Given that Lê’s Adrift in Darkness marks the conjunctions of two historical periods when state protections faltered (his own experience on a boat as a refugee fleeing his hometown on...