Danh Võ
Of the few objects in Võ’s repertoire made rather than found are the many manufactured fragments that share the title We the People (2011–2016). Taken together, the work is a 1:1 scale replica of the Statue of Liberty in 350 parts, just as the original was designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi in 1886. Displayed in its many pieces, each made from a steel armature and copper sheets, Võ’s We the People is a broken, uncertain monolith. And ultimately fragile: “You think of this monumental sculpture, but the image of it is stronger than the physical materiality of it,” the artist says – her beaten metal only two-and-a-half millimetres thick. As the disparate parts of an unseen whole, each fragment appears as an abstract monument to an unrealised ideal. The fractured symbol, dispersed across the world, can never again be made whole. At the time the project was conceived, Võ had not seen the Statue of Liberty in the round, had not stood beneath her triumphant form, but it persisted in his mind as a conflicted beacon; a promise of both war and freedom.
b.1975, Ba Ria
“Old objects give me a sense of comfort, in a way,” Danh Võ says, “because old empires fall apart in time.” In poetic propositions composed of objects borrowed and found, Võ considers the personal and collective histories inscribed in their forms. He is more a collector than a maker; an archivist of traces, of past desires and dispossessions. In his accumulated objects, Võ finds a metonym for the migrant experience. Pairing antiques with more recent artefacts – his grandmother’s fridge, drawings by his father, a grave marker – his mise en scènes offer reflections on his inherited place in history. Fleeing post-war Vietnam by boat in 1979 for America, Võ and his family were waylaid by a Danish shipping vessel and offered political asylum and citizenship in Denmark. Though his work seldom refers to this fortuitous ocean encounter (it was unlikely his family would have otherwise survived their voyage), his practice is similarly shaped by chance. By chance, he acquired the three chandeliers that hung above the negotiation table in the Majestic Hotel in Paris, where the peace agreement for Vietnam was signed. By chance, he assumed possession of a relic of a saint. To Võ, chance is a necessary medium in his work. Such is history, he suggests, all bad luck and good fortune.
