The Museum of Modern Art is currently showing the installation of Dinh Q. Lê’s recently acquired work The Farmers and The Helicopters . The first Vietnamese artist to have a solo exhibition at MoMA, Lê creates work that frequently refers to the Vietnam War and presents both sides of the conflict, informed by his own personal history. The installation, in two adjacent galleries, comprises a three-channel video and a helicopter that was constructed by hand from scrap parts by two Vietnamese men: Le Van Danh, a farmer, and Tran Quoc Hai, a self-taught mechanic. The video, made in collaboration with artists Phu-Nam Thuc Ha and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, interlaces interviews and personal recollections of the war by Vietnamese men and women with clips from American blockbuster films and documentaries made during the war. This installation was first shown at the Singapore Biennale in 2008 and was a big crowd puller. because of its constant interviewing of images, the video is really more of a poem than a documentary film.
