Collages of Assimilation, 50 Years After the Vietnam War
Untitled (Villagers) by Dinh Q. Lê from Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995–2023 at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.
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Before the internet’s oceanic memory, a paper shredder could render the most sensitive documents meaningless. Though in retrospect those cuts seem less final. As the Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê knew decades ago, slicing information into strips could hardly ever provide the wholesale erasure it promised. Lê, who died last April, played with the abstraction by weaving strips of images from Vietnam, where he was born, with images from America, where he landed after fleeing the Khmer Rouge. “From discrete worlds, he conjured a new chimeric whole,” Jason N. Le (no relation) writes in a piece for Portland Monthly about the current Dinh Q. Lê show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (through April 26).
April marks 50 years since the fall of Saigon, the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the artist’s lifelong project of representing assimilation in art. Like a mirror pond obscured by rain, Lê’s most famous works, called photo weavings, juxtapose pixel-like squares of multiple images, often with conflicting depictions of the same history. “Combining historical documentation with media-fabricated narratives, Lê calls into question the veracity of memory, positioning it as a moving target depending on who is telling the story,” Le goes on.
Saturday, April 12 (11am, free), Le will be in conversation at the gallery with Rory Padeken, a curator at the Denver Art Museum who previously curated a major Dinh Q. Lê show at the San Jose Museum of Art. Though the work often depicted horrific events, instead of solely memorializing those lost or striving to amend manipulated histories, it affirms the ongoing lives of people who formed their identities across cultures. As Le has it, the pictures are “a poetic visualization of being between places.”
More Things to Do This Week
READINGS Street Books 15th Anniversary
6–8PM THU, APR 10 | UP UP BOOKS, FREE
Portland’s bike-based library serving people experiencing homelessness is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a fundraising party featuring readings from Stephanie Adams-Santos, Omar El Akkad, and Joshua Pollock.
FILM Portland Panorama
APR 10–20 | VARIOUS LOCATIONS, FESTIVAL PASSES ($150+) OR INDIVIDUAL SCREENINGS
A new film festival is taking up the mantle left by the Portland International Film Festival and the Northwest Filmmakers Festival, both of which ceased operations amid COVID. “Portland is ready to host like a bigger festival again,” the new event’s executive director, Stephanie Hough, recently told Oregon ArtsWatch. Screenings of both PNW and international shorts and features run for 10 days across the city, at Cinema 21, the Hollywood Theatre, Boathouse Microcinema, and the Kennedy School, with a tangle of panels, parties, and installations elsewhere.
MUSIC Pink Martini
8PM MON & TUE, APR 14 & 15 | REVOLUTION HALL, $50+
It makes sense that Pink Martini’s 30th birthday lasts two years—all those people, all those languages! Though the forever-expanding cast has performed a few anniversary concerts elsewhere, these two local Rev Hall shows mark Thomas Lauderdale and China Forbes’s band’s hometown birthday. The regular shtick is to bring up a handful of famous guests—NPR hosts who can sing in several languages and the like—and you can only imagine the anniversary gig would carry a heavier guest list.
Elsewhere…
- Installation artist Emily Counts’s large, dark plain on Earth’s Moon. (Variable West)
- Remembering folk hero Michael Hurley, “a famous flirt and charismatic storyteller whom people often called Snock. ” (NPR)
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