Danh Vo

At the end of the nineteenth century the Catholic missionary Jean-André Soulié conducted botanical research in Tibet and South China. When conflict broke out in 1905, he was taken prisoner by Tibetian monks, then tortured and shot. He left behind numerous botanical drawings that can be seen on Danh Vo’s new bathroom tiles. For the Berlin Biennale the artist has opened his studio apartment to the public.

One might ask what moved the artist to decorate a private retreat with a colonialist’s exoticized drawings and open it to strangers. But one might also ask what the French missionary sought in the mountains of Tibet, and what artworks and the specialist public are seeking when they travel round the world.

Vo rearranges rather than creates things. His combinations of historical and biographical testimony open new perspectives on historical, cultural, and geopolitical processes, and give a glimpse into how the orders of identity and representation underlying these are constituted.

The Rolex watch Vo exhibits at Oranienstrasse 17 was bought by his father with gold left over after the family fled Vietnam on a homemade boat and were picked up by a Danish tanker. With the first money he earned in his new homeland, he bought the lighter and signet ring also on show, objects he had dreamt of in Vietnam. Such items are usually bequeathed by the next generation as tokens of solidarity and tradition; Vo appropriated them via the institutionalized act of purchase, and has exhibited them since in the art world.

Their auratic presentation in the illuminated vitrine detaches the objects from their life contexts, reducing them to their function as coveted objects and symbols of relation. At the rear, one sees that the vitrine is a simple wooden construction. As such it lays bare the staging strategies of the alien, the exotic, and the authentic that shape colonial history and the consumer society. They also shape the social image of the artist, which Vo, by opening up his private space, subjects to a special fracture.

Vo transcends the dispositifs of the private and the alien, showing them as unfinished, historically contingent intersections of social processes. For Vo Rosasco Rasmussen (since 2002) the artist marries people who have influenced him, assumes their family names, then gets divorced. An institution that aims at a settled state is used as a creative instrument. Entries in official documents become a freely shaped, open-ended collage. Using the independent viewpoint that his own experience of migration has given him, Danh Vo reveals the fundamentally migrant status of all objects and subjects, opening up a mode of thinking that leaves fixed boundaries and entities behind.

Translation: Christopher Jenkin-Jones