In Conversation: An-My-Lê, Monique Truong, and Ocean Vuong

A collaboration between the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and MoMA, this conversation will explore themes of memory, autobiography, authenticity, heritage, and the relationship to photography in the work of artist An-My Lê and writers Monique Truong and Ocean Vuong.

This event is in conjunction with the exhibition An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières. For 30 years, An-My Lê’s photographs have engaged the complex fictions that inform how we justify, represent, and mythologize warfare and other forms of conflict. Lê does not take a straightforward photojournalistic approach to depicting combat. Rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora. “Being a landscape photographer,” she has said, “means creating a relationship between various categories—the individual within a larger construct such as the military, history, and culture.”