Danh Vo at Winsing Art Place, Taipei: Exhibition Walkthrough
Danh Vo, We the People (2011–2016). Exhibition view: Danh Vo, See Through History and Look into the Future, Winsing Arts Foundation, Taipei (16 January–5 April 2020). Courtesy the artist and Winsing Arts Foundation.
At the freshly opened Winsing Art Place in Taipei, works by Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo are being presented in Taiwan for the first time (See Through History and Look into the Future, 16 January–5 April 2020). The Winsing Art Place is founded by Winsing Arts Foundation and the exhibited works are drawn from the Winsing Arts Foundation collection.
Among the works on view are two segments of Vo’s iconic sculpture, We the People (2011–2016), a 1:1 copper replica of the Statue of Liberty, which the artist created with a Shanghai manufacturer in 2011. Vo’s statue is composed of approximately 250 parts, which, when disassembled, each resemble unique, near-abstract sculptures made of thin sheets of hammered copper. The parts are now scattered among various private and public collections around the world, never to be reassembled.
Like We the People, there is one of the multiple copies of 2.2.1861 (2009): letters written on paper in cursive blue ink by Vo’s father Phung Vo, whom the artist regularly collaborates with, that replicate the final message French Catholic Saint Théophane Vénard wrote to his father before he was sentenced to death in Tonkin in 1861. Garden with Pigeons in Flight (2018) is similarly composed of multiples: a collection of hanging carmine candles originally created in collaboration with artisans in Oaxaca in Mexico for an exhibition at Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City in 2018. Carmine is a crimson pigment made from cochineal that was prominent in the affluent Catholic Church and traded during the 16th and 19th centuries between Mexico and Europe, and Garden with Pigeons in Flight interrogates colonialist legacies and histories of early globalisation through this exchange.
In this video, the founder of Winsing Arts Foundation, Jenny Yeh, introduces Vo’s exhibition and discusses Winsing Arts Foundation’s position within Taipei’s art scene. —[O]
Main image: Danh Vo, We the People (2011–2016). Exhibition view: Danh Vo, See Through History and Look into the Future, Winsing Arts Foundation, Taipei (16 January–5 April 2020). Courtesy the artist and Winsing Arts Foundation.
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