Dinh Q. Lê
The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia
At the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) in Sydney, Dinh Q. Lê is exhibiting Erasure (2011), a commissioned installation created in response to the amateur footage broadcast around the world in December last year of the tragedy that took place on the Australian territory of Christmas Island. On the morning of 15 December, residents of Christmas Island – a wildlife-rich dot of land located 360 km south of Indonesia – awoke to the sound of screams drifting in from the ocean. At approximately 7am, a wooden fishing boat, buffeted by huge waves, slammed onto rocks at the northern end of the island. On board were Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers, or ‘boat people’ as they’re known in Australia (an expression that refers to people who arrive in Australia illegally and by boat). Between 30 and 50 men, women and children died when their vessel broke apart and sank. Some of the passengers had paid as much as AUS$15,000 to make the journey from Indonesia to this tiny island.
On the floor of SCAF are thousands of black and white photographs, a sea of detritus buoying two parts of a clapped-out wooden vessel. Purposefully stripped back to reveal the ship’s bones, the fragments recall the barely intact vessels used for ‘people smuggling’. Projected on the back wall is a single channel video of a miniature, twin-mast sailing ship engulfed in accelerant-fuelled flames on Ham Tan beach in the southeast Vietnamese province of Binh Thuận. The burning colonial-era ship reminds us that most Australians have arrived from elsewhere – that we’re all ‘boat people’ of sorts.
Dinh Q Lê was ten when he fled Vietnam with his family in 1978. Years later in the United States, he started making art exploring his birth-country’s history and culture as told and mythologized by the West. Now living back in Vietnam, the events of last December provoked Lê to turn his attention to Australia: reluctant recipient of a few thousand desperate refugees who try to arrive by boat every year, the lesser-known fighting force in the Vietnam War and home to a large Vietnamese community, many of whom came to Australia as refugees from the war.
Lê has spent over 15 years buying discarded family photo albums from second-hand shops in Ho Chi Minh. In Erasurethese photographs lie face down; the coffee-coloured photographic paper is what we see along with the occasional inscription – a date, a name, a brief anecdote written in Vietnamese. Only when you pick one up do see the faces of history’s boat people.
Lê is inviting visitors to choose a photograph then scan, upload and save it onto a rudimentary online archive. His idea is that members of the Vietnamese diaspora might find a familiar face and contribute details. This simple act of engagement is the crux of Erasure: Lê wants to put faces and a memories to the statistics and media sound-bites. Writing about the representation of World War I, American journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote: ‘Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.’ Lê is trying, through his art, to illuminate the reality of what Vietnam’s boat people experienced to reposition the current debate away from the reductive political spin. But this minor political offering tucked away in a gallery in the well-heeled Sydney suburb of Paddington is missing an audience. It does not attract the broad readership of Lippmann’s mass media. This lack, unfortunately, puts Erasureclose to what Adrian Piper one described as Easy Listening Art. Impassioned, heartfelt and politically relevant it’s nonetheless too safe to have any impact on the glib debate about Australia’s boat people ‘problem’.
Nicola Harvey
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
