Dinh Q. Lê in Conversation: Crossing the Farther Shore, at National Gallery

Displayed for the first time in Asia in the exhibition Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê’s installation Crossing the Farther Shore (2014) is a rare record of the everyday lives of Southern Vietnamese people in the pre-Vietnam war period, reflected through abandoned images collected by the artist himself.

In this artist talk moderated by art historian Roger Nelson, Dinh Q. Lê will delve into the processes and motivations behind the work, its relation to his practice in photography, his perspectives on his work in the context of the exhibition, and his involvement in the independent art space Sàn Arts, which he co-founded in 2007.

About the Speakers

Dinh Q. Lê was born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, Vietnam. His family left war-torn Vietnam in 1978 and settled in southern California in the US. Lê grew up in Los Angeles, studied Fine Arts at UC Santa Barbara and holds an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1996, he moved from New York to Ho Chi Minh City where he now resides. In 2007 he co-founded Sàn Art, an artist-run exhibition space and reading room that promotes young Vietnamese artists. His installation, The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006) was the subject of a solo exhibition in 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lê’s work was included in the 2013 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and documenta (13) held in Kassel, Germany. Dinh Q. Lê was named the 2011 Prince Claus Fund Visual Art Laureate.

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Roger was previously Curator at National Gallery Singapore, where he co-curated Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z (2019), co-editor of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s I Am An Artist (He Said) (2022), and co-founding co-editor of

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by NUS Press.

Register Here: https://web.nationalgallery.sg/#/gallery-passes-select?id=121028&name=Dinh%20Q.%20L%C3%AA%20In%20Conversation%3A%20Crossing%20the%20Farther%20Shore&type=single

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