Interviews, Issue 9

Danh Vo

Curiouser and Curiouser

Words MARK BEASLEY

Photography ROBERT RIEGER

Danh Võ is a Vietnamese Danish contemporary artist, known for his conceptual works that often explore themes of identity, migration, and cultural history. He was born in 1975 in Vietnam and moved to Denmark with his family as refugees after the fall of Saigon. His art engages deeply with personal, historical, and cultural narratives, often integrating elements of his own experience as an immigrant and his understanding of global political issues. Vo currently lives in Berlin as a caretaker and founder of the Berlin Garden Project. The garden project nurtures living plants connected to his and others’ histories, an ongoing meditation on how we nurture and cultivate identities, and the ways that memory and heritage grow or wither in different contexts.

MARK BEASLEY: There are so many routes into your work, but I keep returning to my first intro, “Autoerotic Asphyxiation” at Artists Space, 2010. The exhibition wasn’t immediate; it had a stillness that invited reflection; meaning wasn’t surface bound. Looking back, I see the beauty more clearly — the tenderness, the intimacy. Perhaps your work is best understood indirectly, through slow revelation.

DANH VÕ: That was a special moment. During a residency in L.A., I gave a short presentation, and Joseph M. Carrier, who lived nearby, came by. He had lived a full life and passed away some years ago. I think he was drawn to me, maybe because I was Vietnamese, maybe because I was young. There was a duality to our interaction — yes, he was cruising, but he was also offering something deeper: history, memory. I wasn’t yet thinking seriously about sexuality and war. I’d seen Hiroshima Mon Amour, but this was different — real life. Joe invited me over, and the next day I visited his modest beach house, filled with photographs and materials. He wasn’t wealthy, but he had clearly lived. I realized then: a gay man in 1960s Vietnam — there’s a story here. I kept going back, kept asking questions.

What people don’t see in the exhibition is that Joe was fired from his job at the RAND Corporation under suspicion of being gay. This was the ‘60s — being out could cost you your security clearance. But he fought it in court and won. Around age 40, he used the settlement to study anthropology. He knew he wouldn’t have a typical academic career, so he pursued what mattered — becoming one of the first to seriously research homosexuality, eventually focusing on male sexuality in Mexico.

The tricky part is how to include stories like this in an exhibition, because people rarely spend time with the details. But that encounter changed everything. Had I been younger, I might’ve dismissed him, but I was at the right age, and something about him drew me in. Joe hadn’t returned to Vietnam in decades and asked me to go with him. I’d never been. There, we saw moments of closeness between men — handholding, gentle contact — not necessarily romantic, but rooted in a culture where physical intimacy wasn’t threatening. After the trip, I returned to L.A. to help clean out his garage. And there they were — photos untouched for decades.

MB: Were they for personal use? Or did he see them as archival?

DV:: He was a hobbyist, but a talented one. I think for him, like for many photographers, it was about preserving something he found beautiful.

MB: Yes, it’s very much the artist’s act, isn’t it? This moment of transformation — almost alchemical. Even if someone hasn’t been taught to see it that way, it’s still there.

DV:: Exactly. Joe’s photos weren’t erotic — they were quiet, beautiful expressions of fascination. He served in the military and was a closeted gay man. What struck me was that photography isn’t descriptive — it’s imaginative. I didn’t choose this project; it found me. The work isn’t just about what’s seen, but what’s conjured.

Félix González-Torres shaped my thinking on this. He spoke about the denoted versus the connoted, drawn to the abstraction within images. I was obsessed with his work as a student. Then came Joe’s photos — his vision of masculinity, shaped by ’50s and ’60s America. I loved what you said earlier about what’s seen and unseen. That spectrum of visibility lingered long after the Artists Space show.

MB: I’ve been thinking about the artists I work with — like Laurie Anderson. For her, everything’s a story, even her voice: sometimes detuned and masculine. It presents as a performance. Growing up in post-punk Britain, I listened to This Mortal Coil’s Cinder Sharp’s non-gendered vocals, or Jimmy Somerville’s high falsetto. No one analyzed it — it just was. That’s how I felt in your show. I’ve seen a lot of art, but something about it moved differently. Meaning can be both explicit, while others engage curiosity without definition. Do you believe that, too?

DV: Improvisation probably best describes how I work. Early on, I just did what I wanted, and thank God for that ignorance. But over time, I had to resist the idea that art should fix the world. That’s what we were taught, but I never believed it. Society feels fundamentally disconnected. I come from wealthy places where people pass homelessness daily without blinking. I’d rather start from that reality than pretend art can solve it.

When I chose to be an artist, I asked myself — What’s the best thing about the art space? The white cube is often seen as neutral, stripping away context. But I saw it as a place to explore what’s missing. There’s always a gap between making, presenting, and that strange space between artist and viewer.

MB: Yes. Something you’ve stated in former interviews, art should estrange, has really stayed with me. I was taught that art heals, that it brings people together. But I’ve come to see that it can also expose wounds, it can acknowledge pain, too.

DV: I came up in the early 2000s, when globalism was the dominant narrative. Inclusion was the big word, especially at Documenta or Venice. But to me, it always felt fake. Performative. During those years, I purposely didn’t exhibit in Asia. I knew it was a Western framework trying to “represent” others. It reminded me of something older — something deeply embedded in Europe’s past.

MB: It’s the world’s fair model. A bit of this, a bit of that, but always framed through a Western lens.

DV: Exactly. And who really came out of those exhibitions? It felt like self-justification. I always go back to a piece I made — a portrait of my grandmother, using a washing machine. That work was so important to me. It was just what you saw. No explanation. I barely knew my grandmother — how would anyone else? That was the point: to show that estrangement. Even now, I don’t fully understand what the work was picking up on. At the time, of course, a few people recognized something and were supportive, but it was never made to be easily understood.