As a painting buff, my "simple" idea of art-making boils down to using a brush, paint, and a canvas. Armed with those, the painters use colors, forms, and gestures, and their relationships, to convey feelings and construct ideas. And so while walking through Danh Võ's recently opened exhibition πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα) at the Stedelijk Museum, I initially thought how out of place my thinking was. But then it dawned on me that, instead of brushes, paint, and canvas, the Vietnamese-born artist uses existing artworks, sculptures, objects, images, even texts and alphabets. And instead of colors, forms, or gestures, he uses their stories, histories, values, meanings, and significance as "formal elements" in his immersive work. Through it, he challenges our cognition, implying the existence of alternative narratives around otherwise well-known stories.
In one of my earlier texts, I argued that people with mixed cultural backgrounds and/or transnational life experiences are somewhat of cultural or societal superhumans. As the unsustainable concepts of nation-states and monocultural or monotheistic countries crumble before our eyes, it’s becoming evident that, in not so distant a future, most of the world’s population will be like that. And while such individuals may struggle to fit into any of the existing (yet imagined) groups, categories, or societies, their multicultural heritage and complex personal story simultaneously add to their adaptability, empathy, and nuanced understanding of identity. And this notion came to mind while learning about the practice of the Vietnamese-born artist, who grew up in Denmark, studied in Germany, and now lives and works on a farm-housing project in Güldenhof, outside Berlin.
I last saw Vo's work in June 2025 at Art Basel Unlimited, where In God We Trust (2020), a large-scale work reimagining the 1777 version of the US flag with 13 steel stars and firewood, was a sobering metaphor for the ephemerality of the "American Dream" concept. That experience got me particularly excited to see him create an immersive installation in the Stedelijk Museum's former collection room, one of the largest spaces of this kind in the country. Vo showed at the same institution in 2008 at its off-site project space, and in 2013, he collaborated with the museum director, Rein Wolfs (who curated this exhibition together with Claire van Els and in close collaboration with the artist). Back then, they introduced the JULY, IV, MDCCLXXVI exhibition, which filled the institution with copper outer-shell fragments from the Statue of Liberty (two of which are included in this presentation). Like many of his works, this piece, now scattered across different collections around the globe, borrows the ideas or "spirits" that linger around a certain object and offers them a new context. In this case, the global symbol of freedom and justice is broken into semi-recognizable pieces, made of 2-penny-thick copper, revealing its "symbol without substance" reality.
And such a subtle shift of meaning, or emphasis of the in-between states or meanings, is a crucial element in Vo's practice. Having lived between cultures and witnessed their destruction, he is dedicated to caring for man-made objects and giving them new life/value through displacement. Whether objects found at flea markets or artworks purchased at auctions, the artist both preserves them while also taking away their original meaning and giving them a new, perhaps pragmatic one. Using intuition as the main drive, and taking the viewer's intuition into account, the exhibition is purposely laid out as a disarray of mutated meanings. Showing an evident appreciation for crafts, the works point to beauty in everything from vintage Coca-Cola crates to torture instruments, and in custom-made Ikebana-like arrangements made with animal bones, flowers, and metal in glass vases. With a cluster of photographs of flowers from his garden, with Latin names handwritten by his father as a symbol of colonialisation, a 16th-century limewood relief in a Campbell soup crate, Roman marble sculptures on custom-made displays, a used Rimowa suitcase bursting with wooden sculpture, 17th century paintings covered by vintage flags, or written notes, the exhibition purposefully creates a stark contrast between simple, DIY-like display structures and the work's rich and profound history. The idea is to shift or reset its surrounding atmosphere and allow the viewer to experience the work according to their own preferences and experiences. “The most beautiful work is the work that changes as I change,” Vo said in a video accompanying the exhibition, underscoring the temporality of everything and the pivotal importance of ever-changing personal experience. —Saša Bogojev
