Danh Vo Untitled 2022

Danh Vo was born in Bà Rịa, Vietnam, in 1975, and came of age in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Vo was still a child when his family fled their home country and settled in Denmark; their assimilation to European culture and the political events that prompted their migration are intrinsic to his artistic investigations.

The fine penmanship in these works is executed by Vo’s father - a frequent collaborator of the artist - who developed his skill in calligraphy during his education in Vietnam. Phung Vo’s training and use of the Latin alphabet charts one specific aspect of Vietnam’s colonial history. Having first arrived with Portuguese and French missionaries in the 17th century, Latin script was popularised by the French administration in the late 19th century in a bid to diminish the cultural influence of China, replacing the use of characters. Phung Vo’s writing ritually appears in the artist’s exhibitions by way of a hand-copied letter titled 2.2.1861, in which French missionary Jean-Théophane Vénard writes to his father on the eve of his death: ‘We are all flowers planted on this earth and picked by God in his time…’

A regular feature in his wider practice, ‘Untitled’, has been included in installations at institutions such as Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Querini Stampalia, Venice, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam amongst others.

Through these works, the artist considers the entwinement of biology and language; conquest and migration; but equally, the mystery of beauty and its capacity to provide aesthetic refuge from the world. Often acquired in multiples, the ‘Untitled’ works take on the presence of an encyclopaedia or botanist’s catalogue, and may be variously arranged by their formal qualities, blooming seasons or another kind of logic.