Return Engagements
By Việt Lê
Published by Duke University Press
Durham, North Carolina, 2021

Recounting his perilous raft escape from Saigon as a child, Việt Lê writes in the preface of his 2021 book Return Engagements: “The afterlife of trauma leaves invisible traces.” The Vietnamese-born American artist and critic has long drawn from his life experience to shape his multidisciplinary practice, exploring the legacies of war and displacement in Southeast Asian contemporary art—more specifically, the pitfalls that both regional and diasporic creatives encounter when wrestling with these personal topics.