Dinh Q. Lê: The Never-Ending Journey

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Never-Ending Journey, on view from March 29 – May 17, 2025. This exhibition will present a selection of works by Dinh Q. Lê, including his monumental installation Một Cõi Đi Về alongside a collection of photographic weavings from the Reamker series, which constitute the artist's final pieces.

Dinh Q. Lê's Một Cõi Đi Về (translated as "spending one’s life trying to find one’s way home") is a poignant exploration of memory, migration, and the deep connection between personal history and cultural identity. Titled after a beloved Vietnamese song, the installation brings together 1,500 vernacular photographs sourced from secondhand stores in Vietnam. These images, stitched into a monumental 14 x 20-foot work, invite viewers to reflect on mid-20th-century Vietnamese history and the diaspora that emerged in the wake of the Cambodian Genocide. Lê's archival approach and expansive scale transform these intimate snapshots into a collective memory, blurring the lines between personal and historical narratives and creating a powerful meditation on belonging and loss.

Lê’s life—shaped by displacement, survival, and trauma—was marked by his escape from Vietnam as a refugee in 1979, after surviving the Khmer Rouge’s brutal invasion. His work engaged with universal themes of survival, cultural dislocation, and the lasting impacts of war. Merging the personal, the historical, and the mythological, Lê’s practice transcended cultural boundaries, offering reflections on shared experiences of loss and displacement that continue to shape both individual lives and collective histories.

In his final works, Lê revisited core themes of his practice, continuing his exploration of historical memory, cultural identity, and trauma. These photographic weavings juxtapose images from the Reamker, Cambodia’s version of the Ramayana, with portraits of prisoners from the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. The Reamker murals, photographed by Lê in their deteriorating state at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, symbolize Cambodia’s once-thriving cultural heritage, now overshadowed by the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. Lê’s engagement with these murals highlights the ongoing dialogue between Cambodia’s ancient artistic traditions and the violent ruptures of its modern history.

This body of work encapsulates Lê’s investigation into how historical trauma reverberates across generations. By intertwining mythological and historical elements, Lê invited viewers to confront the complexities of identity and how cultural narratives are shaped by violence, survival, and time. These final works underscore his broader engagement with the legacies of war, the negotiation of memory, and the resilience of cultural identity within diasporic and post-conflict contexts. In presenting both the grandeur of Cambodia’s ancient art and the brutal scars left by its recent past, Lê offers a profound meditation on the intersections of history, mythology, and human endurance.

Dinh Q. Lê has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at prestigious venues including: Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Mori Art Museum, Japan; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassell, Germany; and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Solo exhibitions include: Projects 93: Dinh Q. Lê (MoMA, New York), True Journey Is Return (San Jose Museum of Art, California), Photographing the thread of memory (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France), and Memory for Tomorrow (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fukuoka Asian Art and the Mori Museum in Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art amongst many others. Lê has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Award and the Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Development amongst others.