An-My Lê
Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider onboard the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars create a division of space implying a separation of the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation. This photograph translates the artist’s ambivalence about military action. But this ambivalence becomes intrinsically complicated through Lê’s rich use of color renders the kaleidoscopic shifts of terrain and sudden intrusion of beauty, atmosphere, and psychology within her observations of the military at work. The heightened aesthetic qualities become unsettling, precisely because they counter the horrific violence that we expect from wartime imagery, as well as our collective historical memory of such extreme traumas as the Vietnam War. Lê’s image, by extension, adds a disconcertingly glossy veneer to a moment of stasis as if to suggest that war and military intervention are defined just as much by the quiet moments in between battle as they are by violence itself.