July 20 - August 19

Binh Danh

Jungles of Memory

Binh Danh was born in a fishing town in southern Vietnam in 1977, two years after the close of the war. In 1979 he and his family escaped the country on a boat and were placed in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Eventually the Danh family emigrated to the U.S. and settled in San Jose, California. Danh was raised in a traditional Vietnamese household, where much of the family's Buddhist practice focused on the worship of ancestors, thus meditating on death and its influence on the living. The themes of mortality, memory, and spirituality became a lifelong inspiration for Danh and a primary influence on his artistic development.

As a college student Danh invented a unique process for transferring photographic images onto the surfaces of leaves via photosynthesis, yielding what he termed "chlorophyll prints." This was an interesting new mode of expression for Danh, but it was his first return trip to Vietnam that catalyzed a revelatory body of work. There he was confronted by the subtle but ubiquitous physical remains of the war, such as bomb craters now converted into rice paddies. Danh observed that the tacit memories of the war's devastation were internalized in daily life. In order to articulate his reaction, Danh makes chlorophyll prints of archival images of the Vietnam War with tropical leaves, sharing his epiphany that the memory of those people and events will reverberate forever through the country's landscape.