Erasure - an exhibition by Dinh Q. Le

Erasure, a new installation by Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Le, currently exhibiting at Sydney’s Sherman Gallery, is a moving exploration of immigration and memory. There’s a strong sense of tragedy as well in the scene of a refugee boat, wrecked on rocks, in a sea of thousands of original photos from Vietnamese family albums. 



The artist, who as a child, fled to the US in the late 1970s, collected the photos over many years from shops in Saigon after returning to his home country to live in the early 1990s. They portray the normality of family life; family gatherings, kids at play, graduations, weddings. They could be from any family album. Most likely though, these families had their normality ruptured by war, politics or penury and it’s assumed that most fled.

While the plight of the millions of Vietnamese that have made successful new lives in the United States, Canada, France and Australia is now well known, these images also speak for an unknown number, believed to be in the hundreds of thousands, that never made it. They perished at sea.

Sifting through these images is a moving experience. There's something disconcerting, even intrusive, in making such close contact with family memories of strangers. And then there's the unknown fate of these people - the young girl in her ao dai costume, the young family with grandparents and their restrained dignity.

Visitors to the gallery are invited to look through the photos, make a selection, and scan them for an archive that can be viewed here.

In his introduction to the exhibit, artist Dinh reflects on the Christmas Island tragedy in 2010. As many as 50 mainly Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers are thought to have perished when their boat broke apart in rough seas off the Australian mainland.

Take a look at our gallery from Erasure by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.

The exhibition will run in Sydney until 10 September 2011