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Edmund Lee

TROPICANA MIGRATION
10 Chancery Lane Gallery
 
For Vietnamese conceptual artist Dinh Q. Lê, the tourism industry in his home country is a double-edged sword. Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, he emigrated to the US with his family in 1979, where he studied visual arts, before moving back to Vietnam in his mid-20s.
Lê understands both local and Western perspectives of Vietnamese tourism, and he isn't happy with what he sees.
"I mean, it provides jobs," he says. "But at the same time, I think tourism in Vietnam is overdeveloped.
"We don't need that many resorts. It can be demeaning sometimes. It trains a whole generation of servants — again. You know, when we fought against the French, it was because we didn't want to be servants any more."
Since his participation in a tourism-themed group exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005, the artist has often put his ambivalent feelings towards Vietnam's tourism into his artworks.
In the middle of the gallery stands a sculpture of Ho Chi Minh inside a refrigerator, a reaction from Lê to the fact that the national leader has been embalmed and made to "greet tourists every day at the mausoleum as a kind of a freak show".

On the other side of the space, photo collages spell out the contrast of Vietnam as a tourist destination, with one juxtaposing an archive photograph of two young girls planting booby traps on the ground with a colourful image of a five-star resort's beachfront today.
"I'm trying to look at the gap between the Vietnamese government's perspective and a kind of Western, American perspective of the war," says Lê. "I'm trying to fill that space and bring it out more. My feeling is that the Vietnam war is so complex, I could spend the rest of my life exploring it."
As someone whose life as a child was changed by the war, Lê remembers feeling that he had little control over things as his family escaped from Vietnam, first to Thailand, then the US. "I think my interest in war is to understand it and, somehow, maybe I can have some control over it," he says.
The artist is now best known for his photo tapestries, which weave together historical photos of war with contrasting images from art history, Hollywood film stills and other beautiful scenes. He says there appears to be no end to his inquiries into the wartime history of his country.
"When you start digging, it gets deeper and the hole just gets bigger, because one thing leads to another," says Lê. "I didn't expect that 15 years later, I would still be dealing with it. Everything is connected somehow."
10 Chancery Lane Gallery, 10 Chancery Lane, Central, Tuesday-Saturday 10am-6pm. Ends April 18. Inquiries: 2810 0065


Vietnam's tourism industry: an artist's critical view

Girls Laying Punji Stake Booby Trapped Furama Resort — Da Nang by Dinh Q. Lê. Photo: May Tse

Dinh Q. Lê

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Dinh Q. Lê's Hong Kong exhibition Tropicana Migration explores his ambivalence about the business of attracting foreign visitors to Vietnam's shores


Dinh Q. Lê's Hong Kong exhibition Tropicana Migration explores his ambivalence about the business of attracting foreign visitors to Vietnam's shores .
