Russian Roulette, from the series Persistence of Memory, From Vietnam to Hollywood

Dinh Q. Lê is a multifaceted artist who has produced sculpture, installation, and video works, but is perhaps best known for his photo-weaving technique, in which strips of photographs are woven together like a traditional Vietnamese straw floor mat. Born in Vietnam, Lê’s family immigrated to the United States when he was ten. He now lives and works primarily in Vietnam.

Russian Roulette presents a literal interweaving of Lê’s relationship to the legacy of the Vietnam War, arising from memory, history, and popular culture. The brutal reality of the war is reflected in Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a South Vietnamese police chief executing a Viet Cong insurgent on a Saigon street, which acts as a large backdrop. Woven into it are frames from a scene in Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter, in which an American soldier, captured by the Viet Cong, is forced to play Russian roulette.