Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam
2010 - Photography (Photography)
40H x 56.5 inches
An-My LE
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars creates a division of space implying a separation the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation. This photograph translates the artist’s ambivalence about military action. But this ambivalence becomes intrinsically complicated through LÊ’s rich use of color renders the kaleidoscopic shifts of terrain and sudden intrusion of beauty, atmosphere and psychology within her observations if the military at work. The heightened aesthetics qualities become unsettling, precisely because they counter the horrific violence that we expect from wartime imagery, as well as our collective historical memory of such extreme traumas as the Vietnam War. LÊ’s image, by extension, adds a disconcertingly glossy veneer to a moment of stasis, as if to suggest that war and military intervention are defined just as much by the quiet moments in between battle as they are by violence itself.
An-My LÊ arrived in the United Sates in 1975 as a war refugee from Vietnam. LÊ is a prolific photographer whose work blurs presumed boundaries between documentary and portrait photography. Her more recent work displays a rich use of color and an aesthetic beauty that belies the horrific imagery associated with violent combat. In such, her photographs also challenge the limits of reportage by suggesting that all representation is, on some level, fabricated for the camera and that the underlying narratives that we as viewers presume are never exactly what they seem.
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