Arch Archives: The Traumas of (Art) History and Modernity in \"Diasporic\" Cambodia and Viet Nam

IIAS Lunch Lecture by Việt Lê, based on ongoing ethnographic research conducted in Cambodia and Việt Nam 2007-14. Việt Lê queries the strategies “local” and “diasporic” Khmer and Vietnamese artists and organizers use in a global art market.

Việt Lê's larger project examines modernity, popular culture and trauma in contemporary art in Southeast Asia and Asian America, with a focus on Cambodia and Vietnam—two countries linked historically and regionally with each other and the United States. He asserts that traumas such as military engagement and modernization return as thematic objects of desire and desired art objects on international art markets, however contested. He will highlight artists, filmmakers and organizers tied to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn, and challenge “diasporic” and “local” categorizations.

In this talk Việt Lê looks at Cambodian painter Leang Seckon and Vietnamese American experimental filmmaker Hồng-An Trương’s return to private and public archives. He argues that the reappearance of history’s fragments—colonial and modern, as well as their formal use of fragmentation highlights the contradictions of time and space inherent in memory as a well as modernizing projects. Memory and modernity is not linear. Memory does not unravel as a single chronological narrative; it starts and stops unevenly. Similarly, development is uneven, discrepant (Rofel).

Việt Lê will also briefly share projects as a curator, artist and organizer dealing with sexuality, modernity, and trauma in the interstices of Phnom Penh, Sài Gòn, Los Angeles, Seoul and Taipei.

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About IIAS Lunch Lectures

Every third Tuesday of the month (and temporarily also every first Tuesday), one of the IIAS researchers will present his or her work-in-progress in an informal setting to colleagues and other interested attendees. IIAS organises these lunch lectures to give the research community the opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and exchange thoughts and ideas. Lunch is provided by IIAS.