Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968) was born in Ha Tien, Vietnam, and escaped with his family by boat to the USA at an early age. He has exhibited in important institutions such as MoMA in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Whitechapel Gallery in London and dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, among others. In 2015, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo will hold his retrospective. He now lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, where he co-founded the non-profit artist-initiated contemporary art space Sàn Art in October 2007.

Lê’s work draws from his personal history and its context, rooted in Vietnam’s recent history of war. Through multimedia installations and photo-weavings, the artist explores issues of personal and collective memory, bathed in political and historical references, such as in Erasure(2011). His practice digs into the past to uncover what has been lost or forgotten, bringing back the memory of what has been denied, covered up or abandoned throughout history and with Vietnam’s rapid race towards economic development. In his recent body of work, which was on show at PPOW Gallery in New York, Lê veered away from his previous work’s exploration of personal history, focusing instead on his artistic practice and testing the boundaries of photography.