As the Vietnamese artist’s first UK solo exhibition, sponsored by BOSS, opens at Nottingham Contemporary, he talks to Nathan Ladd about paradoxical identities and the impact of history on the present
Contemporary artist Danh Võ’s personal history, that of his family and his home nation of Vietnam, is complex, and as I talk to him it becomes immediately clear how difficult it is to address one’s own history. “For people who lived in Vietnam, for my parents who experienced the Vietnam War, I think they tend to try to forget. I was never raised being told stories about their experiences of the war. I think in cases like my parents, when you decide to escape a country, there is also embedded a wish to forget. There are few people that want to be reminded about their traumas”.
At the age of four, Võ and his family were forced to flee Vietnam at the height of the war, and were picked up by a Danish freighter in their homemade boat and taken to safety in Denmark. When I ask him when he became aware of his family history he explains, “As a child I was very embarrassed because there were certain things my family did that no one else did. And I think as a child I was very eager to be like everybody else. I think it was much later that I had to confront the reality that I had some differences. And at a certain point, very practically, I had to make use of it and I had to live with it too.”
Through his art, Võ investigates the invisible boundaries between the public and the private, and their dynamic and fluid relationship as artistic concepts. “I think it’s very difficult to differentiate the personal, and I think the construction of what is ‘personal’ and what is ‘public’ is a construction made by a specific group of people and a structure that I don’t necessarily agree with”. These people and public organisations weave historical narratives that are deemed acceptable publicly but fail to acknowledge the private histories of the people involved. Võ’s artwork seeks to open a dialogue about the histories of peoples and nations rather than impose a narrative.
I ask him about two historically themed pieces of work he has created over the years. One, a life size replica of the Statue of Liberty, cast in copper, the pieces fragmented and placed in multiple locations. Another, an individual letter he discovered from a French missionary in Vietnam, written on the eve of his execution. “First of all when I started to do the Statue of Liberty I really tried to liberate myself from this frame that I was put in, that I was working with my own private history… it was something that everybody would have a personal understanding of”. The Statue of Liberty installation, he feels, was “very easy for people to engage with because it deals with their own knowledge and experience”.
Of the letter, he says “it is very complex and this makes it more difficult to communicate. It is the work that really broke a lot of rules in my thinking, so it’s a really important piece for me… It’s also a piece that turns calligraphy into pure labour”. In these pieces Võ invited people to examine their own past through a very public, popular icon, on the one hand, and an intimate piece of private history on the other.
“History is not something an individual can carry alone, it is a shared phenomenon”
Võ resents the imposition of a historical narrative on his artwork arguing, “Think of when Andy Warhol was making works of the Statue of Liberty, it related to POP! because it was an icon that was POP! But if I do it people think I’m talking about immigration and I never discussed immigration. When I talked about the Statue of Liberty I always talked about how I wanted to make an icon that was very familiar, slightly unfamiliar”. He insists, “It’s very difficult to try to control the audience”.
Võ wants audiences to appropriate the artefacts, images, documents and installations he combines, to address their own history and that of their nations. “My American gallerist is a person who has lived through the Cuban crisis, the Vietnam War, from the American perspective. So when I worked with her I thought it was much more her history than mine. I’m just an effect of it. But the one that really lived it was her”. History is not something an individual can carry alone, it is a shared phenomenon.
Looking to a contemporary example he says, “If we talk about Iraq and if an artist from Iraq is dealing with their country we would tend to think it is a personal history, but I would think we have all been engaged with it”. He believes it’s not just the country forced into submission that must come to terms with its history but also the oppressors.
The final preparations for Vo’s imminent exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, supported by BOSS, are being made as we talk. What does he want to achieve with this new exhibition? “If I have an aim, it is to raise certain questions. I hated schoolteachers and priests who tried to tell you how to live your life. This is what I try to avoid but I, of course, have a wish that my exhibition raises questions and activates dialogue. But it’s a tool to pronounce statements about how to define things”.
Danh Vo is exhibiting at Nottingham Contemporary from the 18 July, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB
