10 Chancery Lane Gallery presents Erasure, by Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê and curated by Zoe Butt- an interactive sculptural and video installation that draws on issues concerning refugees and asylum seekers.

The darkened gallery space will be dominated by a floor-to-ceiling moving image of an 18th-century ship beached on an isolated coastline slowly being consumed by flames. The gallery floor will be strewn with small islands of debris – stone boulders and drift wood fragments. Wreckage of boats will be piled up on top of each other. Amid the destruction will be tens of thousands of small black and white photographs – self-portraits, family and passport photos – which Dinh spent years buying in second-hand stores in the hope of finding his own family's pictures.

During the exhibition, visitors are encouraged to pick up these photographs which will be removed one by one, scanned, catalogued, stored and uploaded to a purpose built website (www.erasurearchive.net) for people to browse through this collection of oan hon (lost souls) and perhaps find their own families.

Starting from the mid 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees sought asylum around the world including Hong Kong. Hong Kong received its first wave of Vietnamese refugees on 4 May 1975. A 3,743-strong refugee group was found arriving on board the Danish freighter Clara Mærsk and were accepted as refugees. Although the Hong Kong Government declared them "illegal immigrants", this arrival marked the start of a wave of refugee migrations to Hong Kong and it soon became a "safe haven" choice. The BBC World Service spurred the choice by making known Hong Kong's 3-month grace period in which to make resettlement applications to a third country. Hong Kong was also known for its liberal policy of allowing landed refugees the right to work. The walls of Victoria Prison, Hong Kong’s first prison, directly face 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. The compound became a transit and repatriation centre when Hong Kong was declared a port of first asylum for Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s. By 1980, more than 180,000 Vietnamese sought refugee rights in Hong Kong.

Born in Vietnam in 1968, Lê moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1979 after fighting erupted between the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge near their village at the Cambodian border. As a refugee himself, Lê was motivated to produce ‘Erasure’ by the tragic sinking of an asylum seeker’s boat off Christmas Island, Australia in December 2010. ‘Erasure’ was initially commissioned and realized by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) in Sydney. Lê has chosen to exhibit Erasure now in Hong Kong due to it’s historical relation as a Vietnamese asylum seeking country. Layered and fragile memory is at the core of Lê's work. His practice challenges how our memories are recalled and how society archives the evidence of human suffering. Lê's work elucidates his commitment to the artistic process as a means of excavating history and the uncovering and revealing of alternate ideas of loss and redemption.

Dinh Q. Lê is considered one of Vietnam's most significant contemporary artists. His work has been shown at MoMA, New York (2011); the Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2008); Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington(2007); Arko Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2007); The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas (2007); MoMA, PS1, Long Island City, New York (2006); Asia-Pacific Triennial Of Contemporary Art, Queensland ArtGallery/Gallery of Modern Art (2006); Asia Society, New York, New York (2005); Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2003); The RISD Museum of Art, Providence, Rhode Island (2002); and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (2001). His work will be featured in Documenta 13, this June. Erasure is a new commission and a curatorial collaboration between SCAF, Zoe Butt (co-director and curator, San Art, Ho Chi Minh City), and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. This is Lê's third solo exhibition at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.