Việt Lê

Profile

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on modernity, sexuality, “sonic spiritualities” and popular culture.

He has been published in positions: asia critique; Crab Orchard Review; American Quarterly; Amerasia Journal; Art Journal; and the anthologies Writing from the Perfume River; Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art; among others.

Lê has presented his work at The Banff Centre, Alberta; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; 1a Space, Hong Kong; Bangkok Art & Cultural Center (BACC); Civitella Ranieri, Umbria; Shanghai Biennale; Rio Gay Film Festival; among other venues. Recent solo exhibitions include “lovebang!”—a sexperimental art music video that explores Southeast Asian popular culture through a fantastic vision of queer love (Cal Poly Pomona), Vestige—a study of Bangkok’s H Gallery’s architecture that engages with fragments of Southeast Asia’s histories, and tan nÁRT cõi lòng | heARTbreak!—a video and photography party featuring Lê’s music video/photographic trilogy (nhà san, Hà Nội). White Gaze, an art book in collaboration with Michelle Dizon and Faith Wilding is published by Sming Sming Books & Objects (February 2018).

Lê co-curated transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix (with Yong Soon Min; Seoul, Sài Gòn, Irvine, San Francisco, 2008-09), the 2012 Taipei Kuandu Biennale and Love in the Time of War (UC Santa Barbara and SF Camerawork). He co-organized the 2015 Artistic Interventions conference (Ph.D. workshops and symposium) in Hong Kong.  

Lê has co-edited special issues of Asian American Literary Review ([Re]Collecting Vietnam, 2015), and BOL Journal (Việt Nam and Us, 2008). He has also co-edited with Professor Lan Duong a special issue of Visual Anthropology (Routledge) winter 2018. He is a reviews co-editor (with Prof. Laura Kina) of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill). 

Lê received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine, and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.  In Taipei, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica. Lê is an Assistant Professor in Visual Studies at California College of the Arts. His writing has been translated into Chinese, German, Khmer, and Vietnamese.