Bin Dahn, is an extremely talented artist whose exhibit “Life: One Week’s Dead” pays homage to the soldiers and more specifically the victims of the Vietnam War. His art work gives a definitive testimony to the Vietnam War and it’s soldiers. Dahn, to create his work, takes leaves and covers them with negatives so that the leaves loose their chlorophyll and then duplicates images onto them. The images he creates incorporate portraits of soldiers from the war in which he obtained from the Life Magazine issue, One Week’s Dead, which was the inspiration for his projects. In Dahn’s lecture he explained that after visiting Vietnam, he realized that remnants of the war linger in the landscape and thus the reasoning for using leaves to portray his ideas. His art works depict what it would be like if the leaves and landscape of Vietnam could talk, the leaves are what contain the war. By placing the portraits of these soldiers on leaves, Dahn is in a sense giving testimony to the Vietnam War and allowing the stories hidden in the landscape surface. Dahn also said in his lecture that photos are the DNA of our memory. So by surfacing these photographs, Dahn is giving validation to the war and allowing his audience to take in pictures of the soldiers and at the same time the feeling of the scenery.
Bin Dahn’s art can be a reflection of current times as well. Many compare the Vietnam War to the current Iraqi War for ambiguous reasons of entry and unnecessary deaths. The vagueness of the faces of the soldiers in the grass art works can represent any and all of the soldiers of the Vietnam War and can even represent the soldiers of the Iraqi War. The faces represent the men who fight in all the wars of the United States to defend our nation.
In Susan Sontag’s “The Image-World”, she examines the concept of photography and its importance in society. Sontag states “a photograph is not only an image…an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a foot print or a death mask.”(p.350). This applies completely to Bin Dahn’s exhibit. His art work portrays the real but it also is “a trace…stenciled off something real”. His pictures are of the real men who died in Vietnam and their stories are coming from the remains left at the site. The grass that begs to tell its story and the fallen men who are trying to break through. Whatever it was that the pictures were not able to capture, the landscape made up for. Sontag also states that “Photograph collections can be used to make a substitute world, keyed to exalting or consoling or tantalizing images.” I thought this concept applied to Dahn’s pictures because they do create a new world. When examining the grass art work, standing close gave a distorted view of what was actually imprinted on to the grass, it looked as if it were simply shards of grass placed next to one another. Upon a second examination from a farther distance, the portraits became more apparent. Despite the clear distinction of a figure, the faces were undistinguishable making the pictures capable of being anyone and everyone, a representation of all soldiers of the war indication of all their presences. Allowing the pictures to be any and all soldiers creates a new world of more general war scene than the specifics of the soldier actually portrayed in the picture.