Pipo Nguyen-duy‘s new body of work, East of Eden: Vietnam, recently opened at the Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles and will run through October 24th, 2009. These large scale, staged color photographs are a blend of documentation and performance, each with an eye on the past and the future. Born in Vietnam, now living in Ashland, Oregon, Pipo teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio as an associate professor of photography.

This project explores hope and renewal thirty years after the Vietnam conflict. East of Eden: Vietnam is the 3rd installment of the artist’s ongoing, epic photographic project that crosses vast terrain and explores the displacement of humanity from a post-September-11 perspective. This new work represents the culmination of 2 grueling trips to Vietnam; Nguyen-duy (in 2005 and 2009) traversed the country on a rented moped in search of war survivors—both afflicted civilians and amputee ex-combatants—and photograph them against the idyllic Southeast Asian landscape. The series has come full circle.