Đỉnh Q. Lê’s The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits

This essay situates Đı̉nh Q. Lê’s 2019 installation, Pure Land, as an artwork that addresses issues of ecology, historical fracture, and narrative. A work by a contemporary Vietnamese-American artist, Lê’s multi-media project, Pure Land, is comprised of both sculpture and photographs. Shining porcelain icons are carefully positioned across the floor, and large-scale silver plate UV-photographs hang on the red walls of the exhibition space. I suggest Pure Land offers a gothic reconceptualization of landscape, trauma, and memory in contemporary Vietnam, analyzing what the aesthetic forms depict and where the hauntings of history and ellipsis of a future imaginary time coalesce. My reading of Lê’s 2019 work thus explores issues of chemical catastrophe, liquid materiality, and phenomenological experience. Multiple close readings of Pure Land show that our own bodily engagement with the installation is a type of radical encounter. As viewers and participants in the space we activate Lê’s disorienting post-human angel figures. Ultimately, the artist’s unusual aesthetic vernacular reveals an uncanny poetics amidst these manifold contact zones of lived experience and transhistorical configuration.