The artist Danh Vo is a Vietnamese descent, born in a South Vietnamese family during the aftermath of Vietnam War. Following his family to escape Vietnam with improvised boat, he was rescued in the high sea and later granted asylum in Denmark.
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| M+ Museum, Hong Kong |
Fostered by his early life experience of assimilating into the European culture, Danh Vo's artworks and practice often exhibit how memories, experiences and beliefs are shared, distributed and transformed across human civilizations. For example in We The People (2011-2016), the artist borrows from U.S. Constitution and the Statue of Liberty in order to present a notion about liberty with contemporary features and elaborations. Originally a gift born from France–United States friendship and collaboration, the Statue of Liberty was reproduced with Danh Vo's interpretation. The artist first faithfully re-fabricated 250 or so segments of the Statue with the same processing technique and copper material as the original one, but then arranged these resulted segments to be displayed in different places around the world. By not assembling the re-fabricated parts, the artist highlights We The People as all the pieces around the world combined together. Hence, instead of focusing on the proportion presented in a particular venue, the audience are now invited to think about the Statue from a global perspective.
On one hand, the artwork is arranged in a way representing the spread of liberalism under American influence, and plus the adoption and resonance of liberal value across the globe and in human scale. On the other hand, with manufacturing process in China, project planning in Germany and fundings from Qatari collector, the artist also reveal a a broader perspective with multiple threads of global exchanges. With all these interconnecting elements, the artist altered the form and meaning of Statue of Liberty to challenge common beliefs about the exclusiveness of culture, and plus to express the non-linear and de-centralized dynamics of mankind.
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| Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York |
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| Faurschou, Beijing |
To be more analytic, we can view Danh Vo's work through Lev Manovich's perspective from Database as a Symbolic Form, which states that creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database.
We can say that Danh Vo' artworks include the collection part, which extract memory from the database of human history, such as written data, imagery, exhibiting artifacts. In We The People, that includes(and definitely not limit to) the history behind the Statue of Liberty, its construction method, insight of modern ideology and global exchange etc.
Then there is also the structuring part, where Danh Vo arrange his work to connect distinctive data together. Just as in We The People, the less-known crafts behind the statue of Liberty are re-introduced, and the hundred years of history between the Statue's construction and 21th century are bridged together.
And finally for the interface part, Danh Vo's works are displayed in forms relevance and provoking to the audience. In We The People, Danh Vo draw the audience's attention by fragmenting the Statue's of Liberty, plus providing an explicit perspective to survey the history and contemporary meaning of the Statue.
In this way, we can see how artworks serve as interfaces to the database of human memories. With the help of artwork, isolated and forgotten topic can be re-activated with contemporary audience engaged, together with new ideas and thoughts coming out of it.
Source:
Danh Vo | The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. (n.d.). The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/danh-vo
Sanyal, S. K. (n.d.). SmartHistory – Danh vo, we the people. https://smarthistory.org/danh-vo-we-the-people/
M+,WestK. (n.d.). https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2138499479644265&id=161240357370197
Danh Vō | We The People (detail), 2011-2014. (n.d.). Artsy. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/danh-vo-we-the-people-detail-24
We The People (detail). (n.d.). “Faurschou.” https://www.faurschou.com/exhibition/we-the-people-detail