High School: Untitled by Dinh Q. Lê (Art Card)

About the Artist

Dinh Q. Lê was born in 1968 in Ha Tien, Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. In the late 1970s, his family became refugees and immigrated to Los Angeles in 1979. He studied art in the United States and now lives and works in Vietnam.

About the Art

Untitled is part of a series called From Vietnam to Hollywood. Lê uses a weaving technique taught to him by his aunt to combine images from Hollywood movies with black and white documentary photography of the war and family photographs found in Vietnamese thrift stores.

Look Closely

• This work of art can be divided into four parts: the background, the images to the left of the MGM logo, the center, and the images on the right. How many photos do you see in each section? List and describe.
• What else do you see? What kind of patterns, colors, and lines do you see?

Discuss

• This art combines actual images from Vietnam and the Vietnam War with stills from the movie Apocalypse Now. What ideas might the artist be exploring?
• In the book Dinh Q. Lê: From Vietnam to Hollywood, the artist describes work from this series as “a surreal landscape memory that is neither fact nor fiction.” What do you think that means? What do you see in the work of art to support your interpretation?

Reflejar

The artist used a Vietnamese grass mat weaving technique he learned from his aunt to create this work of art. How is the process of weaving connected to how the artist explores concepts of place and identity in this work? What is the visual effect of the woven images?

Más información

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