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An-My Lê could be a citizen of the world if she did not have so many memories. Her retrospective opens with a photograph of a schoolgirl. Could it be her?

I doubt it, but with Lê you never know. What looks later like ground action in the Vietnam War is only a recreation in North Carolina or Virginia—or a training exercise in California for wars closer to today. Wall text speaks only of her return to Vietnam in 1994, nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, and what she set out to see. Still, she is not saying, and she herself had barely entered her teens when she left for America. But then she is never saying, in photos that speak for all sides, apart perhaps from her own. She is forever “Between Two Rivers,” at MoMA through March 16—and I work this together with recent reports on photography from Lagos and from Tracey Rose in South Africa as a longer review and my latest upload.

That serious schoolgirl says little as well. She takes care with everything, right down to a proper hat, and her glance gives nothing away. Nor does that first series in Vietnam. Boys playing soccer dissolve in a blur, while adults mill about. A tiger cage and a vast interior with a single desk are devoid of life. Yet Lê is determined to see it all and to listen.

She is caught up in it all as well. That first series took her to the former South Vietnam, where she had lived, and to the north, which held childhood memories as well, but of her mother’s childhood. It also includes shots of Louisiana, where she had fled. The Vietnam War reenactment did not just allow her to participate, but demanded it in exchange for letting her observe. Naturally she fought on both sides. And could that be her playing pool with sailors?

Lê gives the show’s title in English, Vietnamese, and French, not just because Vietnam was once a French colony, but also because she spent much of her childhood in Paris. The two rivers are primarily the Mekong and the Mississippi, but also the Seine, the Rio Grande were she traveled to observe the border, and the Hudson, where she taught upriver from New York City. She also finds affinities. The Mekong and the Mississippi both have storied deltas and storied poverty, and the bayou has a parallel in Vietnam;s tall grass, swampy pools, and flat, parched land. It, too, might make a miserable place for a war. It also helps drive a lifelong conviction that landscape means as much as people.

How much do they mean? They are still not letting on. One might never know one side from the other in the reenactments without a photo’s title. Maybe that is what was so wrong with the war. For ever so many, as another title has it, it was Someone Else’s War at that. Events Ashore shows the U.S. Navy engaged in scientific research, earthquake relief, and flood prevention, but Lê knows that all these, a navy included, may descend on countries like a show of force.

Her latest series, a shift to color, takes her across the United States, looking for clues to its controversies and turmoil, and she herself may wonder whether she finds them. Students protest against guns, but half the time in the background. Migrant labor blends easily into a cattle drive, and the White House briefing room is breaking down or still setting up. Here Confederate statues are neither going up nor coming down. Her very artlessness can seem an evasion. The closest her reenactors come to war’s drama and fear is lightning descending on night ops.

The curators, Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan, take one series at a time. Think of them less as finished work than as personal projects, to which Lê can devote herself completely. She does arrange one series in an open circle, like an old-fashioned diorama. Its fourteen landscapes cover a lot of ground. Does that add up to common ground or telling contrasts? Once again, she is not saying.

Lê’s photos can seem all but artless, and well-meaning critics may praise her more for her history than for her art. The Navy removes unexploded ordinance, but with none of the poignancy of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for whom Vietnam’s past is a minefield, or of boat people for Danh Vo. That diorama might be more immersive if its components meant more. Still, silence speaks to her own sense of helplessness or displacement. When she returned to her last childhood home, “I felt that I didn’t recognize anything,” but she kept looking. For her, a refusal to take sides is taking sides, but in a different war than either side ever knew.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Once again, allow me to use a holiday week to catch up with some posts that never made it to the blog. It has been a busy fall.Tuan Andrew Nguyen knows for whom the bell tolls. He has sculpted an impressive one out of unexploded weaponry, the kind that still covers 80 percent of a province in Vietnam. Yet it tolls not death, but a healing note in Asian tradition—and who can say which will be his inheritance?

In “Inheritance” at the Whitney Museum, an artist’s inheritance is a simple matter of pride. How does that apply to a country after nearly fifty years of Communist rule and, before that, thirty years of colonial and civil wars? Nguyen still asks for healing in a divided nation. Born in Saigon in 1976, barely a year after the city fell to the north and the last Americans were airlifted out, he lives and works to this day in what is now Ho Chi Minh City. Yet he cannot forget what he himself never knew. It has become, in the exhibition’s title, his “Radiant Remembrance,” at the New Museum through this past September 27.

It is a show of shared memories and contested ground, going back to the first Indochina war, from 1946 to 1954, when the French conscripted men from its colonies in Senegal and Morocco as tirailleurs—riflemen, sharpshooters, or snipers. The word sounds ever so quaint for forced labor in a deadly modern war. The soldiers brought death to families like those in documentary photos covering a wall at the show’s entrance. Some still seek acceptance and forgiveness. To judge by Nguyen’s videos, it will come willingly but not easily. The very titles speak of little else, as The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, and Because No One Will Listen.

Taken together, the three add up to the length of a feature-length film, and one can only wander among them as across unexploded mines, wondering what one has missed and who will survive. In the longest, a man begs for a young woman’s understanding, and she herself comes under harsh questioning from others. In a four-channel video, speakers at a microphone speak for the resented and forgotten while rapt faces take in the broadcast. In the last, a woman recites a letter to her lost father, while the images speak to a treacherous landscape of soothing waters and bare, twisted trees. Not everyone would want to claim this inheritance. Many have no choice.

For Americans, the Vietnam War is something to forget. Back then, it was either a brave fight against world communism or the arrogance of a global empire, with little to say for the Vietnamese themselves. For Nguyen, America’s incursion was only a blip in a longer domestic conflict. His videos never once mention it, although its impact is everywhere. He is hardly the only one to have “repurposed” mines and bombs. As art, though, they take on unexpected resonance. They ring out with allusions to the United States.

Unexploded Resonance recalls the Liberty Bell in its scale and wood armature. It might also look at home at the Isamu Noguchi Museum were the found wood not so ornate. Other ordnance has become simulated Calder mobiles—or what Alexander Calder might have produced had he cared for polished metal and reflected light. Nguyen has an eye for beauty, just as he has an ear for shame. Is he also taking a shot at those Americans who never seem to know how to listen? Maybe, but he alludes to Vietnam as well.

As curated by Vivian Crockett with Ian Wallace, the sculpture could serve as props for the videos. They continue the story as well. The mobiles hint at celestial bodies, with titles like A Rising Moon Through the Smoke, Firebird, Rolling Thunder, and Starlite. A Buddhist god in carved wood has golden prostheses for Nguyen’s shattered arms. Can the bell really sound a healing note? Across from video, it is notable for its silence.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.