“History in the Making” by Ann Landi
“Artists seem fascinated by the upheavals and conflicts of the last half century, but the impulse to create history paintings as vehicles of protest or of celebration has shifted to something more elusive, questioning, and often personal. An-My Lê, born in Saigon in 1960, fled Vietnam as a teenager. Her photographs and films take as their subject memories of her childhood home and reenactments on American soil, in which she has taken part, of key battles from the Vietnam War. Dinh Q. Lê’s recent project at MoMA featured a helicopter hand-built from spare parts by two Vietnamese workers and a three-channel video interweaving personal recollections of the war with clips from Western war documentaries.”
