With an openness to personal relationships and fortuitous encounters, Danh Vo’s projects emerge via objects and images that have accrued meaning in the world, whether through their former ownership, their proximity to specific events, or their currency as universal icons. His work becomes an expanding and diversifying series of experiments, questioning what happens if he brings one set of elements together, then another, and another. Rather than creating a pluralist landscape for its own sake, this approach is driven by a profound desire to sift through the layers that inform our present. Power, history, eroticism, personal biography, imperial dissolution and globalist expansion are all in play. The Vo family escaped Vietnam to Denmark in 1979, and the artist’s work embodies the shifting and precarious nature of contemporary life. Vo imagines a world for the artist unbound by obligations to state institutions, social norms and grand humanist projects.

Born in 1975, Vo studied at KADK—The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. He was awarded with the Hugo Boss Prize in 2012 and the Blauorange Kunstpreis by the Deutsche Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken in 2007. His most important exhibitions include the National Gallery of Art, Osaka (2020); South London Gallery, London (2019); M+, Hong Kong (2018); Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (2018); Take My Breath Away, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and SMK, Copenhagen, (2018); Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission series, National Gallery Singapore (2016–17); Palacio de Cristal del Retiro, Madrid (2015); and I M U U R 2 (Hugo Boss Prize), Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013). Vo participated in the international art exhibition at the 55th (2013) and 58th (2019) editions of the Venice Biennale, and represented Denmark at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) with the exhibition Mothertongue.

He lives in Mexico City and is currently working on a farm-housing project outside of Berlin in Güldenhof.

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