Khanh Le - Know Places
Photography, Print
I often think about my hyphenated identity, as a Vietnamese-American, in the context of landscape- a thing of earthly and natural status. When people ask me what Vietnam is like, it is almost as though they expect the landscape to be permanent and non-changing, almost as though it is frozen in time. When I unrecognized the Vietnam that my cousin presented to me, I began to alter and to fabricate the landscape as though they were my own identity that I often reconfigure until it looks “real” enough for others to believe in. Conception of “real” and “unreal” are one of the larger issues that I deal with in my work. I use real images from Vietnam, but they have been reconfigured to become an unreal place. I call this series Know Place as a pun. Just like my images, I know the place but it is no place that can really be found.
Vietnam is as an enigmatic country for countless Americans as it is for me. As a Vietnamese-born American, Vietnam stirs memories of rice paddies stretching endlessly into the silhouetted mountains of the evening sky, of young children riding water buffalos home from a hard day of work in the rice fields, and of quiet nights dripping with humidity and the droning of chirping crickets. Yet, the complexity of contemporary Vietnam and its people are incomprehensible to me because my understanding of it is based solely on nostalgic memories.
As the physical landscape of Vietnam has changed since I left the country in 1989, so has my image of myself as a Vietnamese-American. I feel a close relationship to the country of Vietnam, that its transformations parallel many of my own. By physically changing the landscape imagery to understand Vietnam, I am also reconfiguring my identity to find that distinctiveness of "Vietnam" within myself.