FULL SPECTRUM 2012 | AUCTION LOT 5

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Binh Danh
Divinities of Angkor #1, 2008 
Daguerreotype
Framed: 14 × 12 × 1 ½ inches
Plate: 8 ½ × 6 ½ inches
Signed and dated on label on verso of frame
Ed. Variée 2/3)Courtesy of Haines Gallery

Retail value: $5,000

History is alive and is not a past event. It is happening right now. Everyone's history is our history. I am using the tools of science to help me articulate these complex concepts. Science for me is truth and knowledge, and history is about preservation. Art is the medium I use to express and to visualize my ideas.
Binh Danh, 2009 

Binh Danh’s integration of appropriated material and archival imagery to fabricate memories, both personal and collective, is uniquely contemporary. Danh was only two years old when his family left Vietnam. Because the Vietnam War was rarely discussed as he grew up, he began to use photography as a way to better understand his past and even reconstruct it. 

In 2008, Danh traveled to Cambodia to document and interpret the genocide that took place there from 1975 to 1979. Sites he recorded include the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh; Choeung Ek (site of the notorious “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge); and the world famous Khmer temple of Angkor Wat. For the series, he used a variety of photographic processes to render the collective memory of a country and explore ideas of justice and redemption. His unique and acclaimed “chlorophyll prints” feature photographic images embedded in the leaves of plants through the action of photosynthesis. The daguerreotype Divinities of Angkor #1 is a modern version of the early photographic process that produces a single print that cannot be duplicated. It depicts a partial view of the World Heritage site, which was originally built as a place of Hindu worship, then served as a Buddhist temple, as a capital city, and as a mausoleum. The black-and-white photograph at first appears documentary, but closer examination reveals a conceptual overlay between past and present, between actual and remembered.

Binh Danh earned a BA in Photography from San Jose State University and an MFA in Studio Art from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. In 2010, he received the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco. Danh’s Ancestral Altar #12, 2005, is in SJMA’s permanent collection. It was on view in the 2011 exhibition So, Who Do You Think You Are? 

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