An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers

An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers is the most comprehensive account of the artist’s career to date, encompassing three decades of her work across photographs, embroideries, videos, and installations.

An-My Lê’s entire body of work considers cycles of global history and conflict, contemplating the impact of displacement, politics, and the sensationalizing of warfare. Born in Vietnam in 1960, Lê came to the United States in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, as a political refugee. Published to accompany the artist’s first museum survey in New York, An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers is the first publication to present Lê’s practice across photographs, embroideries, video and installations from over three decades of her career. From her earliest group of works, Viêt Nam (1994–98), a series of black-and-white photographs taken when she first returned to Vietnam, to her well-known series of intentionally ambiguous landscape photography, Between Two Rivers presents all seven of the artist’s photographic series alongside textiles, installations, and rediscovered films. The two rivers in the title refer to the Mekong and Mississippi river deltas-subjects that Lê has inflected with her own experiences of war and displacement. An overarching essay by curator Roxana Marcoci examines the full sweep of Lê’s creative practice, and is followed by four focused thematic essays by scholars La Frances Hui, Joan Kee, Thy Phu, and Caitlin Ryan, and two creative texts by authors Monique Truong and Ocean Vuong.