Danh Vo on destroying art, designer playgrounds, and his first ever show in Hong Kong

A crisp, sunny February morning on Berlin Schöneberg’s busy main road, a few doors from where David Bowie spent his Berlin years. The artist Danh Vo, cigarette and cup of coffee in hand, stands outside his ‘storage space,’ a ground-floor former shop in an early-20th-century building that abuts a kebab takeaway. ‘Come on in,’ he says, opening the door to an airy, stuccoed room. Dozens of abstract paintings in primary colors – oil on mirror foil – are leaning against the walls, while more are stacked up, covered with bubble wrap, on archival shelves. ‘Your new work?’ I ask, somewhat surprised, given Vo’s well-documented suspicion of the medium. It transpires that they are by Peter Bonde, a former professor of his, and will be part of a piece Vo is working on for the upcoming Venice Biennale. The artist cuts a slight figure in oatmeal wool trousers and jumper, and Ugg boots. He speaks in measured sentences with a lilting Danish accent, preferring to speak English despite his long association with Berlin – he moved to the city in 2005.

Vo’s biography is well documented: born in Vietnam in 1975, he fled on a makeshift boat four years later and grew up in Denmark. After graduating from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK), where he was taught by Bonde – ‘I thought he was macho and I couldn’t relate to him at the time,’ Vo recalls – he attended the Städelschule in Frankfurt and quickly made a name for himself in early-2000s Berlin, then a hotbed of experimentation. A series of exhibitions at major museums, the 2012 Hugo Boss prize, the Danish pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and a retrospective at the Guggenheim last year have all marked his rise to artworld fame. 

‘Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint’, a ‘collaboration’ with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), currently on show at the M+ Pavilion in Hong Kong, is his first venture on Hong Kong soil. Initially commissioned to create an artwork for the public terrace at M+ museum (due to open next year), Vō decided to use a delay in construction of the building to stage an introduction to Noguchi’s oeuvre, and in particular his iconic Akari lamps. The exhibition unites Noguchi’s sparse, Modernist sculptures – his apprenticeship with Constantin Brancusi was one of the many stations in a globe-spanning career– with his design objects and Vo’s own assemblages and conceptual sculptures.

Noguchi’s boundary-breaking, protean practice, which not only combined sculpture and design but also set design (he worked with the choreographer Martha Graham), landscape architecture, and, surprisingly, playground design, was highly unusual for the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when artists were very much expected to stick to their métier. The famed critic Clement Greenberg went as far as deriding Noguchi’s work as ‘feminine Eastern aesthetics.’ As a consequence, ‘I was attracted to it immediately!’ laughs Vo. ‘What intrigued me was the affiliation I had with him not being a Modernist – he was totally versatile. We think that he comes from a Modernist tradition due to his association with Brancusi, but we forget that his other mentor, and lifelong friend, was [architect and inventor] Buckminster Fuller,’ Vo notes. ‘The Akaris are the fusion of Brancusi and Fuller — isn’t that great?’

Despite the similarities, both in style and in attitude, between Noguchi’s and Vo’s practices, Vo first encountered Noguchi’s work at a recent exhibition at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. ‘I saw the models of his playgrounds [Playscapes], and seeing all these unrealized proposals triggered me. This artist was casting his failures in bronze,’ he says, clearly bemused. For the Herzog & de Meuron-designed M+ museum, he will construct, he says, one of ‘Noguchi’s playground proposals, which I think is so relevant for our time.’

A public environment poses an entirely new set of challenges for the artist. Working through another artist’s work is typical for Vo, who has long favored collaborations of all kinds. But in every case, the context of an art institution has been crucial to his ongoing questioning of the nature of art. Reviewing his retrospective at the Guggenheim, the critic Roberta Smith noted that ‘not much of Vo’s art looks like art, even by today’s standards,’ and that it was the art museum that gave meaning to his undertaking. A public project, therefore, lacking this context, is taking him into the unfamiliar. 

‘Making public art at, for example, a train station, which people use because they have to, is very different [from making art for a white cube]. You don’t want to have some crazy artist’s life, vision, or ideas imposed on you.’ A Noguchian playground, then, is an elegant approach: a piece that straddles the boundary between art and design, a collaboration with an artist of mixed Asian heritage, who worked everywhere and truly belonged nowhere. All these elements are echoed in Vo’s practice.

Asked to define what art, in the end, is for him, Vo fixes me with a piercing stare. ‘I really love to work with questions, and to broaden possibilities. So, it could be an agenda that destroys what we think art is. But isn’t that good? That was what I learnt from Felix Gonzalez-Torres – you have to work in oppositions,’ he says. ‘There’s a certain force in the artworld that wants to define things, especially when you have a so-called different background or history. I really believe in a multiplicity of identities. That’s probably also one of the reasons I’m attracted to Noguchi’s work.’ 

Vo’s work often serves as a Trojan horse for other artists, whose works prominently feature in exhibitions where he is nominally the invited artist. His earlier Guggenheim exhibition, in 2013, focused on the mundane items of Sino-American life that the Chinese-American artist Martin Wong had assembled with his mother. This results in an expanded concept of the readymade, where an artist’s oeuvre is used as a ‘conceptual readymade’ – as something to appropriate, to recontextualize.

Questioned about this hybrid artist-curator approach, Vo refers to one of his mentors, Julie Ault, a founding member of Group Material. ‘It was always natural for me to have to involve people, to curate things. I believe that, as an artist, you have formed a certain way of thinking. And that can be broken, of course. If I’m choosing two objects, it’s because I think they create a tension together. I don’t think it’s that different when I take two artists, or an artist’s work and my own work, and choose a particular constellation. The only difference is that I have to be a bit more responsible.’

Challenging assumptions to highlight issues of memory, culture, loss, violence, both personal and public, and bringing forgotten practices to the fore lie at the core of what Vo does. He plays with the status of the artist – both his own and that of his peers. By treating an oeuvre as a readymade, he points to the boundaries of art, the limitations that we set in the cultural reception and treatment of artists – and that often still involves Modernist and pre-Modernist ideals of the totemic, auratic art object and the artist as genius, no matter how much Postmodernist thought attempted to shift this. This approach has attracted controversy. ‘I got so much criticism working with Martin Wong at the Guggenheim, when I did the Punta della Dogana, and when I did a show with Peter Hujar. People were really criticizing me for “abusing” intellectual artists in my work. Afterwards, I told myself I didn’t need that shit. But then, I can’t help it, you know? Because when I saw Noguchi’s work, I was like, “I’m going to show a lot of Akari lamps.”’

The reaction doesn’t appear to have dampened his enthusiasm: asked about the Bonde paintings stacked in the storage space, Vo explains that it’s about creating a constellation of craftsmanship, gathering works by his father (Phung Vo, a skilled calligrapher and frequent collaborator) and photos by his boyfriend Heinz Peter Knes. The result will be shown at the next Venice Biennale. ‘Just put a bunch of things together and see what comes out of it,’ says Vo. Including Bonde, whose practice he had a tense relationship with while at university, is a sign of maturity – ‘It’s my age [Vo is 44] and my situation now, and I want to embrace these contradictions,’ he explains. In the end, the pieces are a ‘little army of crazy people to attack the Venice Biennale with beauty,’ he says, impishly.

Danh Vo will feature in Art Basel’s Conversations program at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019. Learn more about the program here.

‘Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint’ runs until April 22 at the M+ Pavilion, West Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Danh Vo will take part in the 58th Venice Biennale curated by Ralph Rugoff, ‘May You Live in Interesting Times,’ which takes place from May 11th, 2019. 

Top image: Danh Vo. Photo by Nick Ash.