Born in a town situated on the border with Cambodia, Dinh Q. Lê came to the United States with his family in 1978 to escape the Khmer Rouge invasion. In college, he studied computer science and photography. While in college, Lê noticed that narratives of the Vietnamese people were lacking, in comparison with the abundance of stories of the Vietnam War experience for Americans, and began producing works inspired by the untold stories that were being left out of various research studies and commercial films. In addition to participating in group and international exhibitions around the world, including the Venice Biennale (2003), documenta (Kassel, 2012), and the Singapore Biennale (2006, 2008), Lê held his first large-scale solo exhibition in Asia at the Mori Art Museum in 2015, Dinh Q. Lê: Memory for Tomorrow. In 1997, he returned to Vietnam and established the artist-run art space Sàn Art in 2007.