Dinh Q. Lê

[8] During his first weeks returning to Vietnam, Lê was reminded him of his Việt kiều roots, of being treated as a foreigner, noting, "I had a romantic notion that I was still a Vietnamese but I was too Americanized.

[16][17] Having grown up in the U.S. and seeing Western-centric portrayal of Vietnam, Lê's works often focus on unheard stories, revealing "a more complex understanding of Vietnamese identity – beyond that of an extra in American war movies".

[19] Lê casts "a critical eye on the role of the media and photography in constructing biased narratives of the Vietnam War," and "shreds historic photographs and interlaces the pieces" to create "tapestries that tell a different story".

[21] In 2018, he curated Guerilla Tactics, a solo show of contemporary ceramics by the artist Nguyen Quoc Chanh at MoT+++ in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

He stated that it was inspired by his aunt's technique of weaving mats out of grass,[8][23] an approach which Lê describes "were really about me trying to locate my place in America, in the West".

"[9] Scrolls (2013) with digitally distorted images of Vietnam War: Thich Quang Duc, a monk who self-immolated in protest against the treatment of Buddhists; Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the girl photographed running naked after napalm bombs attack of her South Vietnamese village; General Ngyuen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese national police commander executing a Viet Cong prisoner; and women and children in great distress after the massacre of civilians by US troops.

[27] Lê’s use of a scroll evokes the traditions of Chinese landscape paintings, narrating "the cumulative story of an event by virtue of the length of the scroll on which it was painted, and reversing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “precise moment.”[28] For WTC in Four Moments, Lê has created a four-channel video work with sound, depicting the World Trade Center in four stages: before, during, and after the collapse, and during the rebuilding.

[29] Lê first printed 200 metre-long stretched digital images, that he used to create a six minute video of each, removing "all iconic connotations associated with September 11th, leaving the viewer to reconsider the events as a slow progression of moments that led to a cataclysmic trauma and the newly built One WTC.

[33][34] Lê created what he calls “a sleeping, dreaming memory of Vietnam,” by stitching together canopies which "offers a new image of the country no longer stricken by conflict and war, but filled with love, possibility, and hope".

[38] The collaborative installation with Phunam Thuc Ha and Tuan Andrew Nguyen of The Propeller Group,[39] included a working helicopter built from scratch by Le Van Danh, a farmer, and Tran Quoc Hai, a self-taught mechanic.

[38] Holland Cotter of The New York Times noted that it appeared to be the museum's most popular exhibit when he visited, and described it as "a visually tight and ideologically porous weave of fact and fiction, memory and illusion, with the elements of each pair in constant, volatile interchange.

[55] Lê filmed the islands from a boat, a bird's eye view and by using a drone for "The Colony" (2016), a five-channel video installation with three projections and two monitors.

It’s just history repeating itself.”[60] For his first video work, Lê explored the idea of departure, a crucial moment in the diaspora experience "when one leaves, sometimes abruptly and sometimes by force, to venture into the unknown," as well as the "sometimes difficult yet equally courageous act of return".

[33] To highlight the topic of Agent Orange and its ongoing impacts in Vietnam, which at the time was less-discussed,[61] Lê staged a pop-up exhibition kiosk in the Central Market in Ho Chi Minh City, with toys and clothing designed for conjoined twins,[62][63][64] that questioned the "socially constructed perceptions of purity and impurity, of acceptance and rejection.

[69] In what Lê described was a completely new challenge, he collaboratively created the quilt installation "The Ties That Bind" for Ichihara Lakeside Museum, working with Japanese, Vietnamese and people from various countries.

[70][71][72] The concepts of the installation were based on interviews Lê conducted that provided him with deeper understanding on people's connections and their longing for families back home.