(Long Island City, NY, August 29, 2002) – P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents the first U.S. exhibition of the work of Vietnamese-American artist An-My Lê.

An-my Lê was born in 1960 in Vietnam and came to live in the United Sates as a political refugee in 1975. In 1999, Lê began working with a group of Vietnam War re-enactors in North Carolina and Virginia, who, like the better-known Civil War re-enactors, re-stage battles, training, and daily life of soldiers—both Viet Cong and American GIs.  For two summers, with war veterans, their children, and military personnel who “missed out” on a combat tour to Vietnam, Lê participated in and photographed battles of the Vietnam War re-staged on her adopted American soil.

Taken outdoors with a large-format camera, the richly detailed 30” x 40” black-and-white images possess the serenity and clarity of mid-19th-century American landscape photography. The work therefore participates in both documentary and staged veins within contemporary photography, in an achievement both rigorously aesthetic and conceptual. Soldiers at rest give themselves up to portraiture, while figures captured in mid-battle compositions recognizable from classic war photojournalism somehow possess the qualities of a dream.

An-my Lê received an MFA in Photography at Yale University in 1993. Recent exhibitions include Photographs from the Permanent Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2001); Documents, Perceptions, and Perspectives, Rhode Island College, Providence (2000); Re-imagining Vietnam, Fotofest, Houston (1998); Selections from the Permanent Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (1997-98); New Photograhy 13, Museum of Modern Art, New York, (1997-98); and Picturing Communities, Houston Center for Photography (1997).

3rd Floor hallway.  Selected by P.S.1 Associate Curators Larissa Harris and Daniel Marzona.