Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 16, 2025 : Danh Vo, a Vietnamese sculptor (#2332)

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Artist of the Day, July 16, 2025 : Danh Vo, a Vietnamese sculptor (#2332)

Danh Vo (1975) was born in Bà Rịa, Vietnam. He is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, and the Städelschule, Frankfurt. His practice, existing at the intersection of autobiography and collective history, explores the signification found within archival traces as well as the malleable nature of personal identity. With references to migration and integration, Vo’s largely conceptual body of work destabilizes the embedded structures of legitimacy within citizenship and identification.

The conceptual work Vo involves the artist’s marriages to and immediate divorces from important people in his life. Assuming and amassing the surnames of his temporary spouses, Vo authors his own history by collecting fragments of identities through the institutional conventions of marriage. Further exploring representations of identity, Vo collects the personal belongings of his family members, ready-made artifacts symbolic of a particular aspiration or standard. The artist’s family fled the trauma of postwar Vietnam in 1979 by boat: though bound for the United States, their vessel was intercepted by a Danish shipping freighter and the family eventually emigrated to Denmark, where they were granted political asylum and citizenship. Oma Totem (2009), a stacked sculpture of his grandmother’s welcome gifts from a relief program on her arrival in Germany in the 1980s, displays her television set, washing machine, and refrigerator (adorned with a crucifix), among other items. Das Beste oder Nichts (2010) is a piece composed of the engine from his father Phung Vo’s Mercedes-Benz, a vehicle that is at once emblematic of success in the West and of his father’s own identity. In this work, the engine and other symbols of his father’s determination and achievement, such as a gold Rolex watch, Dupont lighter, and U.S. military ring, represent both a new selfhood and an all-but-forgotten past.

Also integrated within Vo’s work is an analysis of authorship, as in 2.2.1861 (2009), a transcription of the final letter French missionary Saint Jean-Théophane Vénard, wrote to his beloved father as he awaited execution, having been sentenced to death for proselytizing in Vietnam. Each work in this open edition is rendered by the artist’s father, Phung Vo, in the meticulous calligraphy he learned as a child in Vietnam—a task that he will continue indefinitely, while his health allows. As Phung Vo has no knowledge of the French language, his diligent labor takes the form of a purely visual exercise.

Vo’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at a range of international institutions, including the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Basel; Artist’s Space, New York; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel. Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away, the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to be shown in the United States, was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Vo has participated in a number of international group exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennial; Singapore Biennial; New Museum of Contemporary Art Triennial, New York; Venice Biennale; Milan Triennial; and Whitney Biennial. Vo’s work was featured in the Danish Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and, that same year, Vo curated the exhibition Slip of the Tongue at the Punta della Dogana, Venice, in collaboration with curator Caroline Bourgeois. Vo was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst and awarded the Blau Orange Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken and the Hugo Boss Prize. He lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City.

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