» Damaged Gene

Damaged Gene grew from Dinh Q. Le’s firsthand observations of the silence surrounding victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Children and adult beggars with birth defects as a result of exposure were often seen on the streets, their twisted limbs, enlarged heads, and conjoined bodies were the living evidence of a chemical legacy that remained unspoken. Agent Orange, the dioxin-laden herbicide deployed during the American War in Vietnam, has been proven to cause cancers, birth defects, neurological disorders, and contribute to intergenerational trauma. 

In this work, Dinh Q. Le turned his research on Agent Orange into a cabinet of grotesqueries: cheerful figurines of conjoined twins, double-collared student uniforms, and baby clothes emblazoned with the corporate logos of companies later sued by the Vietnamese government for their role in chemical warfare. Staged as a pop-up exhibition inside a kiosk at the Saigon Trade Center in 1998, the installation resembled a commercial display of toys and children’s products, except every item bore the mark of genetic mutation. 

By juxtaposing innocence with deformity, and consumer culture with atrocity, Damaged Gene questions the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and history, and reality and representation. It also marks one of the earliest chapters in Dinh’s lifelong critical pursuit to confront the lingering scars not only of the American War in Vietnam, but also of global conflicts in general. Through his art, Dinh transformed suppressed histories into tangible forms that demand to be seen.