Conversation: Bard Professor An-My Lê and Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen Discuss the Influence of Their Experience as Vietnamese Refugees on Their Work

“When a book of Lê’s work was published in 2005, I wrote about one particular photograph in which she herself appears, playing the part of a Viet Cong guerrilla about to ambush American soldiers. That photograph gestures at wartime images and Hollywood fantasies about the deadly natives, which, when I was growing up as a Vietnamese refugee, were the only depictions I ever saw of people who looked like me. Its humor and self-awareness really drew me in,” writes Nguyen in the New York Review of Books. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

Post Date: 03-09-2021