Danh Vo (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
Currently on view at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, artist Danh Vo continues a body of work mining disparate historical and biographical threads to realize densely layered environments that challenge and complicate shared understandings of history and meaning.
Danh Vo (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
Vo’s work operates on a precise and meticulous series of operations, taking historical movements, moments of historical violence and the echoes of trauma, and translates them through the lens of modernity. Context and underlying narratives are significant, with the dense layered meanings of the artist’s work opening out on to delicate and expansive conversations across history.
Danh Vo (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
In one work, a letter by the missionary Théophane Vénard, who was decapitated in Tonkin, is presented, re-written by the artist’s father, a gesture that negotiates his own training in Western calligraphy, Vo’s early life in Vietnam, and the war that forced his family to free the country. Each of these notes float under the surface of the work, disguised by the meticulous hand of the letter, and the gentle intent of the text. Yet taken as a whole, the frank conflict of cultures, and the violence that ensued, folds outwards from the work in all directions. In another pair of works, a relic is shown half-hidden in a suitcase, and another is stuck inside a crate. The interlocked networks of trade and globalized capitalism are explicit, yet equally so are interpretations of cultural pillage and appropriation. Yet Vo, here, takes his objects from the canon of the West, religious artifacts that appear lifted directly from the eaves and naves of the churches that abound outside the gallery in the streets of Paris.
Danh Vo (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
The show as a whole continues a dialogue Vo has masterfully orchestrated across the course of his career, posing the modern landscape of Western political relations against not just recent history, but deeper interrelations between the West and East, always underscored by the crossover with the artist’s own personal life. Here, that narrative arc returns, and imbues the work on view with a subtle, but weighty understanding of the world around us.
The show closes November 20th.
Danh Vo (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Chantal Crousel [Exhibition Site]
