Danh Võ

Biography

Danh Võ got his surname from a Danish official. When the family was registered, his middle name Trung Kỳ was entered as his first name, and the family name Võ was put last. He was born on 5 August 1975 in Vietnam; Vũng Tàu and Bà Rịa are both given as his birthplace.

In 1979, when he was four, the family left South Vietnam in a homemade boat. At sea they were picked up by a freighter belonging to the Danish shipping company Maersk. The family settled in Denmark, and his grandmother later ended up in Germany.

His childhood was spent mostly in Nivå, near Copenhagen, where his parents ran a grill bar. A teacher at his secondary school advised the boy to paint, having noticed his feeling for colour and form. Võ applied to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts several times and, so it is said, was admitted on the fourth attempt. There he studied painting, then gave it up and moved to the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 2005, after graduating, he moved to Berlin and in the same year held his first solo exhibition, at Galerie Klosterfelde. Residencies followed at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles (2006), the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (2009) and the Villa Medici in Rome (2013). Since 2002 he has been working on “Vo Rosasco Rasmussen”: he marries people who matter to him and divorces them at once, keeping the surname of the former spouse. His full official name is now Trung Kỳ Danh Võ Rosasco Rasmussen.

His installations are assembled from documents, photographs and works by other artists, and almost always concern identity and belonging. In “Oma Totem” (2009), the things his grandmother received under a relief programme when she arrived in Germany in the 1980s are stacked on top of one another: a television set, a washing machine, a refrigerator with her own crucifix. For “2.02.1861” (from 2009) the artist asked his father, Phung Võ, to copy out the last letter written by the French Catholic missionary Théophane Vénard to his own father before he was beheaded in Vietnam in 1861. By 2017 there were 1,200 copies; the total remains open as long as his father is alive. In “Autoerotic Asphyxiation” (2010) Võ showed photographs of young Asian men taken by Joseph Carrier, an American anthropologist and counterinsurgency specialist who worked in Vietnam for the RAND Corporation from 1962 to 1973. Carrier left the artist his large photographic archive.

“We the People” (2010–2012) is a life-size Statue of Liberty, recast by a Shanghai fabricator from thirty tons of copper sheet as thin as two pennies. Võ did not assemble the roughly three hundred sections: after they were made in China, they were shipped to some fifteen sites around the world. From mid-May to early December 2014 the work was shown in New York under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, in City Hall Park and in Brooklyn Bridge Park. While it was being installed in City Hall Park, a few pieces were stolen, replicas of the chain links at the feet of the original statue. Parts of the work are in museum collections, such as the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Frieze ranked it fifth on its list of the best works of the twenty-first century.

In 2013, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Võ devoted an exhibition to Martin Wong: nearly four thousand small artworks, objects and trinkets that had belonged to Wong filled a specially built gallery lined with plywood shelves. The title, “I am you and you are too”, was printed on Wong’s business cards. In the same year, at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, he showed or altered fourteen belongings of the late US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, bought at a Sotheby’s auction. Among them were the pen used to sign the Gulf of Tonkin memo and a 1944 photograph by Ansel Adams.

In 2013 Võ also took part in the Venice Biennale. His work has been shown at the Walker Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthaus Bregenz and Kunsthalle Mainz. In 2014 he shared an exhibition with Carol Rama at Nottingham Contemporary, in November opened a show at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and in 2018 the Guggenheim held the first major American survey of his work, “Take My Breath Away”. In 2007 he received the BlauOrange Kunstpreis, in 2009 he was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst, and in 2012 he won the Hugo Boss Prize. In 2018–2019 M+ in Hong Kong showed him alongside Isamu Noguchi. In 2025 the Royal Danish Academy’s Academic Council awarded him the Thorvaldsen Medal, and in February 2026 a solo exhibition opened at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.