Hùng Lê

Work Description

All That’s Been Said and Left Unsaid, 2025
Glass beads, cotton thread, and hand-dyed indigo cotton and linen
69.25 x 45.5 in. each panel 
Courtesy of the artist

In my dream, Việt Nam was never touched by war. The sun scorches her skin, free of the orange stain, and the rain slows down her breath, reminding her that she is alive. The fields provide and homes stand tall. Here, there were never any bullet shells or neglected land mines. In this dream, my parents still call Việt Nam home. Má became a weather woman who learned English because she wanted to and Ba became an actor whose father never dragged him out of the audition line. They met by chance and reminisced about their hometown. They fell in love and never had kids. In my dream, they were just two kids in love and they were happy.

Memories are fragile and can easily be manipulated, making it an essential site of investigation to consider not only what we choose to remember but also what we actively choose to forget. My practice examines the aftermath of the American War in Việt Nam, in particular how personal memory is retained within objects, photographs, and oral traditions compared to how collective or national memory is created and preserved through education, archives, and propaganda. The work continuously attempts to engage with themes of immigration, sexuality, nationality, and the American Dream by weaving together individual narratives and shared history.

Unearthing and re-creating memories employ it as a method of resistance and empowerment by centering neglected narratives as a form of personal documentation that negotiates the personal relationship with the social. The continuous picking of these inherited memories highlights how our longing to belong intertwines our perception of ourselves with larger conversations of race, nationality, and gender.

Utilizing fabric, photographs, and found objects in combination with laser engraving and indigo dyeing, memories are excavated and manifest as installations, piecings, and collages as a means to define and redefine individual identity. Through these processes, personal and collective memories become physical spaces where their credibility is questioned, manipulated, and pieced
back together.

Within my work, the entanglement of personal and collective memories challenges the authorship of history and raises questions of who gets to be the keeper of history and who is left behind and forgotten. Is the fate of the “other” destined to be forgotten and reduced to an anonymous statistic?

Recognizing the limitations of relying on languages as the main form of communication, Lê begins to visually deconstruct English and Vietnamese to create unfamiliar coded motifs. By overlaying these motifs with dense interlocking patterns, Lê leans into their inherent confusion to resist the notion of a fixed narrative. Through this process, Lê attempts to destabilize language’s role as a reliable archival tool, calling into question how the authorship of history is constructed, manipulated, and maintained.