Danh Vo, Danish-Vietnamese artist whose work doesn’t fit neat little boxes
Exhibition at Hong Kong’s White Cube gallery shows morbid and random nature of artist’s work, inspired by his upbringing in Copenhagen after fleeing Vietnam aged four, and by horror film The Exorcist
The work of the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo is about death, colonialism, randomness.
He probably won’t like being neatly boxed up into that opening sentence, although packaging and language are also recurrent Vo themes. He’s the kind of artist who doesn’t want to interpret what he does: he prefers you to do it. But the hidden metaphors only reveal themselves if you know the story.
In 1979, when he was four, his father put his family into a home-made boat and fled Vietnam. The optimistic destination was America. Eventually a container ship owned by the Danish shipping company Maersk plucked the speck of them from the sea. So he grew up in Copenhagen, studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, then at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.
In 2015, he represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale. A different wind, a different tide, and he could have ended up in Hong Kong, stuck fruitlessly in a camp for years. Or dead.
