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Dinh Q. Lê fled a war-torn Vietnam as a young boy aged ten. He remembers feeling so small in the vast ocean; he remembers the horizon. Lê’s briny journey took him to a refugee camp in Thailand and then on to Oregon, USA, a land he described as seemingly magical, where apples littered the ground in excess.1 That visual of arrival is beyond erasure. It is the retinal burn of memory. As Australians that visuality is deeply layered, the bookend images from Captain Cook’s landing at Botany Bay to the most recent images of a refugee boat tossed upon Christmas Island’s jagged coastline (December 2010)—the one spurred by colonial arrogance the other by trauma.
In Erasure (2011) Dinh Q. Lê brings these two together in an extremely poignant installation commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), his first solo exhibition in Australia. Arriving in the dimly lit gallery, viewers pass across timber decks slightly raised over a turgid sea of anonymous photographs, face down, their decaled corners curled with age relaying a sense of movement. Commanding the space on the end wall is a single channel projection of an eighteenth century tall ship, beached on an abandoned coastline and being engulfed by flames. The camera pans around, scanning the carnage in an endless loop of violence. The image is ghostly, thin and overlaid so there is a perpetual sense of fracture or dislocation. And ‘… the sky above is lit with a striking melancholy … It is as if William Turner has returned to the digital age …’2 Across the gallery is the debris of ships wrecked and shards of rock. The wind on the coast whips... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline