The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Against a backdrop of mythologising and polarising images of military force and war, An-My Lê’s fantastically detailed photographs of the prosaic activity of military personnel suggest both a myriad of untold stories and the spread of American military deployments in the post- Cold War era. Taken between 2005 and 2008, when Lê travelled as an embedded photographer with the American armed forces, as they moved between non-combat operational sites, the ‘Events Ashore’ series was made in Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Haiti, the north Arabian Gulf and Senegal, as well as Antarctica, Japan, Iraq and the United States (California). Claiming to be neither for nor against the US’s military activities, Lê turns her attention away from the more impulsive and sensationalist images of war, as favoured by the media and popular culture, to focus on what happens at the margins of service. In Damage Control Training, USS Nashville, Senegal 2009 and US Marine Expeditionary Unit, Shoalwater Bay, Australia 2005, marines in formation at sea and ‘at ease’ in a foreign landscape, respectively, appear bored, exhausted or uninterested in exercises they may eventually act out ‘for real’ on the battlefield. In Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam 2010 and Portrait Studio, USS Ronald Reagan, North Arabian Gulf 2009, those working below deck in humanitarian or public relations roles, designed to project an image of compassion and authority, look controlled and staged; they appear to remain emotionally distant despite their objective for engagement. In light of the recent proliferation of emotive frontline photojournalistic and ‘lo-res’ amateur war imagery — increasingly taken by the younger members of the US military on their own hand-held cameras and electronic devices — Lê’s photographs appear to be both emotionally removed, empirical observations of military operations and superbly crafted works of art. Taken on a large-format, five-by-seven Deardorff view camera, more commonly associated with nineteenth-century landscape photography and studio portraiture, these images demonstrate Lê’s interest in the subject of political structures, while also revealing an awareness of photographic, cinematic and artistic conventions. Citing inspiration in nineteenth-century European documentary and landscape photography — from British war photographer Roger Fenton to Parisian street photographer Eugène Atget — along with twentieth- century American photographers and filmmakers — from landscape photographer Robert Adams to Hollywood filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola — she uses time-intensive equipment to produce large and incredibly detailed negatives in order to shrewdly recalibrate the aesthetic tropes of war. Born in Saigon in 1960, five years after the Vietnam–US War began, Lê was forced to flee Vietnam with her family following the fall of Saigon to the communist north in 1975. While not unfamiliar with foreign cultures (from 1968 to 1972, Lê lived in Paris with her mother and two brothers, while their mother undertook a doctorate at the Sorbonne), she arrived in California as a political refugee at the age of 15, displaced from her country of origin as a result of one of the modern era’s most divisive conflicts. This complex personal history provides the conceptual framework for Lê’s artistic repertoire, which has included four major series on Vietnam and the US military: ‘Viet Nam’ 1993–98, a series of documentary photographs taken on her first trip back to Vietnam since 1975; ‘Small Wars’ 1999–2002, a series exploring a small subculture’s re-enacted battles of the Vietnam–US War in the US state of Virginia; ‘29 Palms’ 2003–04, a series documenting US marines training in the California desert in preparation for deployment to Iraq; as well as ‘Events Ashore’ 2005–ongoing, the series exhibited as part of APT7. All these series, the first three of which were shot using black-and- white film, not only demonstrate Lê’s interest in the prolonged study of the preparation leading up to and the post-traumatic effects of war, but also the centrality of the landscape within which these physical and psychological battles play out. ‘Conjuring up a sense of clarity (if not necessarily the truth)’, 1 An-My Lê’s highly detailed photographs attempt to reconcile what the artist thought she knew — about Vietnam, the US military, cultural and political histories, subcultures, photography and art — with what she found when she was actually in ‘the field’. In their beautifully-crafted and measured way, these photographs are a kind of artistic evidence, providing proof of a contradictory world. Sally Foster 1 Lesley A Martin, (ed.), Small Wars: An-My Lê , Aperture Foundation, New York, 2005, p.125. AN-MY LÊ Proof of a contradictory world 146