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Artist

 

Khanh Le
( United States )

Design; Digital Art; Drawing; Mixed Media; Painting; Photography; Print; Sculpture


Khanh Le - Neither...Nor  Photography, Print

Even though I identify myself as a Vietnamese-born American, I still do not know what it means. There is a discord within my own origin due to the fact that I was born too late. By the time I have arrived, Vietnam has already claimed its independence. Being born too late effectively removed me from that point in history. Growing up in the United States, I learned to adapt my identity living between two cultures. Identity is the central theme of my works, and I examine it through the bits and pieces of my personal memory and the collective history from the two cultures. Within the series of Neither…Nor, I revisited these historic images from the war that made me feel shameful: I altered or took them out of their original positions.

What happens to their identities and their contents once they become removed? I slowly placed them in contrast with the images I collected from Better Homes and Gardens, Detail (men’s fashion magazine), GQ (men’s fashion magazine), and Architectural Digest magazines I found at the grocery. I began to place figures from historical images and film throughout all of the living spaces that I have desired since childhood.

Trapped between present and past, there was a sense of helpless when producing this body of work. The things that link these two streams of time together were the images from my own personal family. I have slowly replaced the historical war icons with members and scenes of my own family as well as the extended family living in Vietnam. Rather then blurring the border, I color coded it as point of reference of the clash of the Vietnamese-ness and the American-ness.

    SLIDESHOW
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Of This and Not That

 
Then and Now

 
In Between

 
There, Not Here

 
T/Here

 
Neither This nor That

 
Of This and That

 
Could Of, but Is Not

 
Of This rather Than That

 
Not Here or There

 
Of Neither

 
Not That

 
Not This

 
Could Be Here or There

 

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