Reframing “Vietnam war photography”

A&M's Fresh Face is where we profile an emerging artist from the region every month and speak to them about how they kick-started their career, how they continue to sustain their practice and what drives them as artists.

Lê Nguyên Phương.

Lê Nguyên Phương (b. 2002, Hanoi) is an artist and researcher whose work is deeply connected to the various Vietnamese communities he belongs to. He employs photography to explore themes of identity, family, sexuality, and decolonisation. His projects give form to stories that deviate from dominant narratives, and at times make space for personal histories and collective memory through collaborative strategies. Phương has exhibited at Studio 3năm and Photo Hanoi Biennale (Vietnam), Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film (Singapore), Jakarta International Photography Festival (Indonesia), Angkor Photo Festival (Cambodia), Photo Elyseé (Switzerland), and Museum of Australian Photography (Australia).

In 2023, Phương was the recipient of the Objectifs Documentary Awards (Singapore) and Tall Poppy Press Publishing Prize (Australia), which resulted in a debut monograph and solo exhibition for his body of work Sunshine. The project is centred around Sunshine, a suburb in Melbourne where a large number of refugees from the American War in Vietnam settled in the 1970s. The artist describes Sunshine as a “gateway” to connect with postwar experiences, addressing notions of diaspora, national identity, and longing. The multi-faceted narratives from immigrant communities in Sunshine also transcend traditional imaginations of what Australia is. Phương offers a nuanced perspective on place and belonging connected to his own experience as an individual who grew up in Vietnam but is currently living in Australia.

Lê Nguyên Phương, *Long Tân (My father)*, 2025, pigment inkjet print, 150 x 100cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Lê Nguyên Phương, *Thành Phẩm*, 2025, exhibition view at First Site Gallery, Melbourne. Image courtesy of the Christian Capurro.

His recent solo exhibition Thành Phẩm (2025) features images from a body of work by the same title. Created in collaboration with members of his family and queer community in Vietnam, Phương approaches photography as a relational practice of memory-making and co-authorship. One example would be works from the Vở ô ly series which revisits Phương’s father’s experience as a soldier in a little-known border conflict in Seam Reap in 1985. Layering newly taken photos, family archives, and texts from his father’s memoir onto grid-lined notebooks, the artist challenges the official history he was taught in school. Taken together, Phương’s practice reframes what war photography looks like when it centres familial and intimate ties.

Interview

Lê Nguyên Phương, *Đỏ (Red)*, 2025, pigment inkjet print, 150 x 100cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

You are currently pursuing a PhD in Fine Art at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University. Could you briefly describe your higher education experience thus far and motivations for taking on further research at a PhD level?

I completed my honours year as part of the Bachelor of Arts (Photography) at RMIT University in 2024 before beginning my PhD at the same institution. Pursuing higher education in the arts is a privilege. There is not a single second that I feel I can take for granted. I feel grateful that the framework set up by my lecturers, most notably Dr Kelly Hussey-Smith who is my supervisor, helped me understand how artistic practices can operate relationally and be socially engaged. This perspective makes me acutely aware of my own privileges and has driven my curiosity to examine the underlying power structures that shape my life and the lives of those around me.

I guess taking on the PhD was a natural progression at that point, as my practice had opened up all these questions for exploration. I also believe that the earlier I begin this research journey, the more time I will have to sit with these questions and let them challenge, surprise and engage me.

Who has been a mentor or an important artistic influence? And why?

I was paired with Vietnamese-Australian artist Phuong Ngo as my honours supervisor, and I could not be more grateful for that relationship during such a formative year of my studies. Although we had known each other previously, I was a little hesitant to reach out to him to talk about art, so having the opportunity to work with him formally at RMIT was exactly the guidance I needed. He was both generous and rigorous in his feedback. It felt as though he was the first person within the university setting who truly understood my work, given our similar yet different backgrounds. He was born in Australia to immigrant parents fleeing from Vietnam, while I had spent most of my life in Vietnam before moving to Australia.

He knew exactly what my strengths and weaknesses were and was upfront with me. Because of our aligned politics, our relationship as mentor/friends grew even after I had graduated. We later worked together on several different projects such as translation for his book Inheritance, or a recent artist talk as part of my exhibition where both of us critiqued the Western structure of uplifting violent “Vietnam war photography” on Vietnamese bodies.

Lê Nguyên Phương, *Thành Phẩm*, 2025, exhibition view at Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Ballarat. Image courtesy of the artist.

What was one important piece of advice you were given?

A friend once introduced me to John Cage’s “10 Rules for Students and Teachers”, and rule #7, probably everyone’s favourite, stuck with me. “The only rule is to work. If you work, it will lead to something.” I suppose it also comes with an unspoken prerequisite: to know when to work and when to rest. I think keeping that rule in mind often helps with the mental side of things, especially when the world does not seem to be very nice or the work just seems to not be going anywhere. It helps me pick myself up for the love of the game.

Do you make a living completely off being an artist? If not, could you share what other types of work you take on to supplement your income? Do these activities also inform/ affect your practice?

I guess I can say yes now. I received a fellowship with my PhD, which covers most of my living expenses, but I have taken up different jobs to make extra income. Previously, I had a commercial photography practice that was different from my artistic one, where I was accepting pretty much any photography job that came up. I would assist on product shoots, work with agencies on fashion shoots, photograph finance events, take LinkedIn headshots etc. It was not until last year that I started to photograph events and do exhibition documentation for galleries and artists. I am still active now in that field, on top of my PhD and some classes I teach at RMIT in the Photography department.

Your recent solo exhibition Thành Phẩm (2025) is presented as a multi-venue show at the Ballarat Foto Biennale and First Site Gallery in Melbourne. Could you say more about the exhibition title and how this show came about? How were the artworks selected for each venue?

The title Thành Phẩm comes from a Vietnamese word that can be translated into English as “a product” or “a finished good”, though these translations fail to capture the full nuance of the original term. The English equivalents tend to lean toward industrial connotations. In Vietnamese, the title can refer to something formed through a process of making and shaping. This process can also be understood in less tangible terms, encompassing generational lineage, historical contexts, and lived environments. I think this ubiquitous word works well to connect ideas from several different series within the exhibition, across both venues.

The works all share a common thread of framing my photographic practice as a collaborative process with members of my family and queer community in Vietnam. The intention is to shift notions of “war photography” that have dominated Western perceptions of my country. I focus on offering different perspectives on survival and intergenerational storytelling. At the City Library in Ballarat, a regional city in Victoria, Australia, I take over a public space and present photographs made with my family. The images tell fragments of different familial stories: my father and I learning about the Battle of Long Tân in Vũng Tàu; my grandmother showing me her heat lamp, which she uses to ease the back pain caused by years of strain from throwing grenades during the war in Hà Nội; and my mother playing the violin, an instrument she first learned as a little girl.

At First Site Gallery, a more traditional gallery space in central Melbourne, I present a focused selection of prints from Vở ô ly. They are works created by reprinting new photographs made with my father, alongside images from his archive, onto my old student exercise books. The two shows happened at the same time and viewers could read them as two approaches to memory-making within my communities.

Lê Nguyên Phương, *Vở ô ly (Untitled 1)*, 2025, inkjet print, Vietnamese notebook paper, felt pen, highlighter, ballpoint pen. 30 x 20cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Thành Phẩm (2021-ongoing) is an overarching project comprising a few bodies of work such as Giao Điểm and Vở ô ly. What are the themes, ideas or methodologies that connect these different series? And how does this framework shape your approach in these smaller bodies of work?

Growing up, I heard many stories about my family's involvement in the military, especially through their roles as professional sportspeople for Thể Công, a sports team founded and managed by Vietnam’s Ministry of Defence. I found this connection between sports, war, and masculinity to be extremely amusing. In particular, how it shapes the difficulties in which the men in my family can freely share their stories and vulnerabilities with each other. And then there are similar terminologies between volleyball, the sport that my father and paternal grandparents played professionally, and warfare such as spiking, hitting, decoy, cut shot, etc. that almost bittersweetly foreshadow some of the stories and secrets my father would share with me later.

So, I would make different kinds of works that respond to these ideas, commenting on familial stories and broader experiences in contemporary Vietnam. For example, Giao Điểm is a series of self-portraits I made in collaboration with my father in Cambodia to see how photography, a hobby he once considered very “macho”, can become a way for us to confront history together on a land that holds many of his memories. Another work Vở ô ly centres on the act of unlearning official state narratives that were instilled in me through the public education system. On the same grid notebooks I once used in school, I transcribe words from my father’s memoir, an ongoing draft he has been writing. This forges another layer of collaboration between us.

My works often draw from shared sources but take shape in different forms. Hence, presenting them as part of an ongoing, overarching body of work feels most true to their nature. I wish to reframe the aftermath of the war in Vietnam as an ongoing structure that intersects with many different aspects of our lives as a collective society, not only in bringing people together but also tearing communities apart. Therefore, I am interested in this relational act of photography in creating opportunities for storytelling gestures and opening up new dialogues that otherwise may not happen.

Could you share your favourite art space or gallery in Vietnam? What draws you to that space, and what does it offer to your practice?

Without a doubt, it is 3năm Studio in Ho Chi Minh City, which is now sadly closed. Many young artists and I were welcomed to meet up in that space, exchange ideas, attend great community activities, and get to know new lovely people. What made 3năm unique was that it was not dedicated to a specific purpose; instead, it supported whatever wild idea an artist or arts worker had to bring the community together. The studio fostered an irreplaceable sense of belonging that I benefited from immensely as an artist. It reminds me of the wonderful people who make creating art so meaningful. Without them, I do not think I would have become the artist I am today. I remain in close contact with the artists who made that space possible: Chị Liên, Chị Vanessa, Anh Đạt, Anh Kai, and Thái Tuấn. But admittedly, the closure of 3năm still leaves a lingering void in the hearts of many creatives in the city. We have lost other significant spaces in the last few years, including the recent closure of Sàn Art. The art community in Sài Gòn is after new spaces to incubate ideas together.

Lê Nguyên Phương, *Sunshine*, 2024, exhibition view at Objectifs Centre for Photography & Film, Singapore. Image courtesy of Objectifs.

What are your hopes for your own local art scene, and regionally as well?

I hope new initiatives in Vietnam can be given the freedom and support to operate on a long-term basis, with the system working along them, not against them. Education plays a large role in this, and I wish that gatekeeping would no longer be a problem within the community. I would also love to see book publishing take on a more significant role for artists, especially lens-based practitioners, and that there is a robust ecosystem to support this rich medium.

I hope for more collaborations among different initiatives in the region and opportunities to produce collectively. I have had the privilege to travel within Southeast Asia, and am inspired to see community initiatives such as Angkor Photo Workshops in Cambodia, Objectifs in Singapore, PannaFoto in Indonesia create so much with so little.

Are there any upcoming exhibitions/projects that you would like to share?

I am currently working on an exhibition I am extremely excited for, which will happen as part of the Photo Hanoi Biennale 2025, held in my home city. More to share soon!

This interview has been edited.

Fresh Face: Lê Nguyên Phương

Fresh Face: Lesley-Anne Cao