NEW YORK.-This fall, Asia Society presents an exhibition of works by the internationally known contemporary Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Lê. The exhibition, Vietnam: Destination for the New Millennium—The Art of Dinh Q. Lê, brings together works produced over a seven-year period, including a selection of his signature woven photographs, more recent photographic, sculptural and mixed media projects, and a new installation of two, small-scale mirrored satellites.

Reflecting the multiple perspectives of his background, Dinh Q. Lê’s work examines the personal and political conflicts between Vietnamese, American and Vietnamese American points of view. Born in 1968 in a small town in Vietnam on the Cambodian border, Lê and his family migrated to the U.S. in 1978 via Thailand. Raised and educated in the U.S., he returned to Vietnam in the early 1990s, and has been residing there for nearly ten years.

Lê draws on disparate images to challenge American popular perceptions of Vietnam, particularly the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War). Works in the exhibition reference Hollywood portrayals of the war and depiction of Vietnamese Americans as refugees. Lê’s work also addresses issues in contemporary Vietnamese society, from the painful legacy of the war to the country’s aspirations to become a world-class tourist destination and its efforts to negotiate between capitalist and socialist ideologies.

“Dinh Q. Lê’s compelling works can be read on many levels—as an examination of Vietnamese society against competing, stereotypical representations, and as a meditation on identity, belonging and cultural displacement manifest not only in the immigrant experience but in the experience of living inside and outside American and Vietnamese cultures,” says exhibition curator Melissa Chiu, who is the Asia Society’s Museum Director and Curator of Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art. “Lê’s work provides a significant narrative that addresses the country’s recent past, present and future from a point of view that has been largely absent in western popular imagination. The exhibition is very timely coming 10 years after the normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam and in view of the recent exponential growth of Southeast Asian immigrants in the United States.”

The exhibition will include some of Lê’s best-known works, woven photographs, from the series From Vietnam to Hollywood (2000). Using traditional weaving techniques he learned as a boy watching his aunt weave grass mats, Lê weaves strips cut from various photographs into large-scale, mosaic-like works. In this particular series, the artist weaves photojournalistic images taken during the war with digitally enhanced stills from Hollywood films about the war, such as Apocalypse Now. A selection of works from the series was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003.