Quiet Thoughts

This was the first exhibition at Art Space Vincennes. I discovered online Los Angeles artist Trang T. Lè’s general call for advice on her new portfolio.  After viewing her stunning work, we offered her a show at our gallery with all her shipping expenses covered. She accepted.

As South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese, Lè’s father, an officer who worked for the Americans during the Vietnam War, was discovered in hiding and taken to a prison, where inmates were ‘re-educated’ for 7 years, then released. Once released, several families, including Trang’s, worked together to find a boat with an engine and escaped by sea from Vietnam. They became what Americans called ‘the boat people’. Their motor eventually failed, and their boat drifted for days until a steamer found them, picked them up, and took them to Cambodia. Eventually, because of her father’s service to America during the war, her family was brought to the US and granted citizenship.

When the Afghanistan war broke out, Lè had already been resettled in LA.  She began to suffer post-traumatic stress triggered by hearing about the war. She sought therapy. She went on a campaign to find the names of every American soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. For years, she tracked down names and recorded her findings in a log.  She then covered eight panels with a dark sky and filled them with 117,978 stars, each one representing a serviceman who died in the war.  They connected each name with her memory of the sky at night as their small boat quietly drifted in the darkness, lost at sea. The sky gave her comfort.  She began to look at the sky during the daytime, as well, to deal with her current post-traumatic stress, creating large canvases sometimes almost blank with very subtle changes of the clouds. Eventually, her post traumatic stress dissipated.

By quiet, meditative observation, she was able to face her memories and deal with her post-traumatic stress. For her, it took years. She looked back honestly, despite the difficulty of doing so, at the causes of her trauma and created beautiful metaphors (of the sky, clouds, and stars) that gave her peace then and continue to now –a valuable lesson for all of us.  From Trang’s exhibition forward, each show we offer has provided some overriding message, meaning or impact that could be useful to the alert viewer.

‍