“In 1985, my father, then a professional volleyball player for the Vietnamese military, went to Siem Reap with his team as part of an athletic training camp. A year later, he was sent back to Siem Reap, not as an athlete, but as a soldier. The battle he participated in was part of a secret border war in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. As such, my father was never considered a veteran by the Vietnamese government. In 2024, I travelled to Siem Reap with my father. We visited sites of his battle, shared a motel room, played volleyball, and made photographs of each other. I could no longer place my father’s stories on the periphery. I needed to be nearby.
By reprinting photographs from this trip and presenting them alongside archival images onto pages from the Vietnamese student exercise book (the titular Vở ô ly)—sourced in Saigon and reminiscent of those I used during high school in Vietnam—I attempt to unlearn the knowledge I once held about my father’s experience of war. That knowledge was shaped by the dominant narratives of the Vietnamese Communist state, disseminated through public education, as well as by the American-centric global framing of the American War in Vietnam. Through this lens, I seek to interrogate inherited understandings of masculinity within my lineage while safeguarding my father’s memories. This work extends on a previous series exploring the interplay between war circumstances and family, remembering and forgetting, the rupture of collective memory, and the effort one makes to fill the gap in-between.”
- Phương Nguyên Lê
Phương Nguyên Lê (or Lê Nguyên Phương in Vietnamese naming convention) (b. 2002, Ha Noi) is an emerging Vietnamese photographer, artist, and researcher. His works focus on themes of collective identity, community, and family in the aftermath of the American War in Vietnam.
In 2023, Nguyên Lê was the recipient of the Objectifs Documentary Awards (Singapore) and Tall Poppy Press Publishing Prize (Australia), which resulted in a debut monograph and solo exhibition for his body of work Sunshine. Working across the Asia-Pacific region, Nguyên Lê has exhibited at Đà Lạt Art Biennale 2024 and Studio 3năm (Vietnam), Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film (Singapore), Indonesia Photo Fair and FOTO Bali (Indonesia), Angkor Photo Festival (Cambodia), RABA Gallery (Japan), Museum of Australian Photography and PHOTO 2024 Biennale (Australia).
Image Credit: Phương Nguyên Lê, Untitled, 2024—, in Vở ô ly. Image courtesy of the artist.
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