Review: These Paper Boots are Kicking in Chicago
Lê Hiền Minh’s ‘Parallel to Hell’ at Co-Prosperity, Chicago
By Nora A. Taylor
Le Hien Minh, Me So Horny, 2025, traditional Vietnamese handmade Dó paper, buffalo skull, ceramic mask, wood, sound. Photo by Laurel Hauge. Image courtesy of the artist.
Those who have seen the Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) 1987 film Full Metal Jacket might remember the scene where two young American soldiers, on an R&R break, get propositioned by a Vietnamese prostitute. The scene, shot in a London studio, takes place in a fictional recreation of a Saigon street and the encounter is a shocking reminder of the misogynistic, sexist and racist treatment of Vietnamese women in wartime Vietnam. In it, we see a woman, from the back, in a short skirt and sleeveless blouse, strutting into the frame to the beat of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin. We watch her approach the two GIs sitting at a sidewalk café and hear her say: “Hey baby, you got girlfriend Vietnam?” When one of the men answers “Not this minute,” she repeats “me so horny, me love you long time.” The scene is disturbing in many ways. For one, it depicts a Vietnamese woman as a prostitute and for another, if that is not demeaning enough, she speaks in broken English, thus emphasising the stereotypical fantasy of the sexually available uneducated Asian woman. Fast forward to May 2025 when, a few days after the 50th anniversary of the divisive war in Vietnam, the words to Nancy Sinatra’s song appear in the windows of Co-Prosperity, an experimental cultural centre located in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago. This time, they form the work of Hanoi-born, Saigon-raised, and now Chicago-based artist Lê Hiền Minh.
For this installation, Minh has created three works that carry us back to that time when Vietnam, in the American popular imagination, was a war and not a country, and when images of Vietnamese women were often pejorative and racist. The first work titled Me So Horny is a near literal visualisation of the words uttered by the woman in Kubrick’s film. A hybrid creature with horns and beads dangling from her head to the floor, she hangs against the wall like a trophy or a supernatural being. The work is made by placing a Japanese Noh mask against a buffalo skull, the whole covered in paper. Its title, Me So Horny makes the association between the scene in the Kubrick film and the work quite clear. The woman in the window is literally “horny.” By placing the horns on her head, she appears to have taken the form of a more masculine antlered animal. Minh plays with the gendered or sexual associations made with the word “horny” as a metaphoric representation of an erection.
Le Hien Minh, Once Of These Days These Boots Are Gonna Walk All Over You, 2025, traditional Vietnamese handmade Dó paper, bioplastic, thigh-high boots, wood. Photo by Laurel Hauge. Image courtesy of the artist.
The second work consists of a pair of thigh high laced boots, also made of paper, placed on a lofty pedestal. The boots, like the horned woman, have horns emanating from the side which make them seem menacing, like spikes. The title of the work, One of These Days These Boots are Gonna Walk all Over You also clearly references the Nancy Sinatra song that served as a backdrop to the scene in Full Metal Jacket. Minh reinforces its literal meaning by creating boots that may very well fight back as they are empowered with horns.
Le Hien Minh, Untitled, site-specific text-based work, 2025, traditional Vietnamese handmade Dó paper, acrylic paint. Photo by Laurel Hauge. Image courtesy of the artist.
Finally, over the windows of the Morgan Street side of the gallery, is a text printed on paper that reads in all capital letters: “ONE OF THESE DAYS THESE BOOTS ARE GONNA TO WALK ALL OVER YOU.” The retaliative message is clear.
Minh has taken these small but not insignificant details from the film to highlight the war-time environment in which women are often the victims. She calls on the viewer to reflect on the violence of war and, by creating these works out of paper, she presents a paradoxical situation in which brute force can be softened with paper and pink lettering, amplifying the tension between fragility and power.
For over two decades, Minh has employed the medium of paper, specifically Vietnamese handmade dó paper, a material that originates in the Red River Delta region and historically used for woodblock prints and ink and watercolor drawings. Minh’s use of dó is anything but traditional. First, she envelops three dimensional sculptures with it thus highlighting its versatility and exploring its potential in figuration. Secondly, in using paper as a medium, Minh emphasises the gendered quality of materials by associating the stereotypically softer texture of paper with the hardness of horns and leather, disrupting the binary of the feminine and the masculine.
Le Hien Minh, Invisible Dragon, 2023, traditional Vietnamese handmade Dó paper, wood, resin. Photo by Laurel Hauge. Image courtesy of the artist.
In addition to her longstanding use of paper, Minh has consistently been concerned with women’s roles in society and the issue of female labour. Since arriving in Chicago in 2022, she has been interviewing nail salon workers who, for the most part, are immigrants from Vietnam. This culminated in a series of works that similarly feature sharp objects. Here, in a series called Ornamentalism that pays homage to the protective deities of Vietnamese tradition, she merges elements from Eastern and Western spiritual figures and affixes long pink nails to replicas of the hands of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and menacing spiky nails to the back of a virgin Mary figure.
These works challenge viewers to rethink stereotypes against Asian women in America. The horned creature, the powerful boots and the words from Nancy Sinatra’s song prompt us to reconsider the message in Kubrick’s film. While one may see the movie only as a blatant display of masculinity and racial violence against Asian bodies, Minh focuses instead on the sole woman in the film and celebrates her defiance. She embraces her boots and horns and offers her dignity by preserving her in a paper shroud.
Lê Hiền Minh’s Parallel to Hell is on view from 2 May to 14 June 2025 at Co-Prosperity, Chicago, IL USA.
About the Writer
Nora A. Taylor is an art historian who specialises in Vietnamese modern and contemporary art. She is the Alsdorf Chair and Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii Press, 2004, reprinted in 2009 at NUS Press). She is co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP Press, 2012) as well as numerous essays on Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Art. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2013.
