Danh Vo

Danh Vō (born 1975) is a Vietnamese-born Danish performance art inspired conceptual artist. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Danh Vō (pronounced yon voh) was born in Bà Rịa. After the Communists' victory and the fall of Saigon, the Vo family and 20,000 other South Vietnamese were brought in 1975 to the island of Phú Quốc. When he was 4 years old, his family fled South Vietnam in a homemade boat and was rescued at sea by a freighter belonging to the Danish Maersk shipping company. The family members settled in Denmark, and their assimilation into European culture and the events that led up to their flight from Vietnam are reflected in Vō's art, which juxtaposes the historical and the personal. When Danh Vo and his family were registered by the Danish authorities, the family name Vo was placed last. His middle name,Trung, was recorded as his first name.

Vō has been based in Berlin since 2005, after finishing school at Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he went after quitting painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He had residencies at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles (2006) and at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (2009).

Vo's installations, which are composed of documents, photos and appropriations of works of other artists, often address the issues of identity and belonging.

During his travels, Vō discovered a farewell letter written to his father by a French missionary working in Asia on the eve of his execution, one of many killings that precipitated the French colonization of Vietnam in the mid-19th century. He asked his own father, Phung Vo, a Roman Catholic who ran small food businesses for 30 years in Denmark, to rewrite the French letter in his exceptional penmanship, send an original transcription of the letter to anyone requesting it for 100 euros and to archive all the exchanges. More than 200 of the transcriptions have spread virally to individuals and institutions around the world.

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