Danh Vo Makes a ‘Live’ Show of Other Artists’ Work in Venice – ARTnews.com

Danh Vo suggests in his work that you don’t necessarily have to make something in order to call it your own. The typewriter Unabomber used to write his statements was included in the Guggenheim Museum’s 2018 retrospective, as was a chair used by a member of the Kennedy administration. None of these things were out of place in the Museum of History. But in Fu’s hands, they became art.

And so it can be a little annoying when Vo makes anything at all, no matter how amateurish he may be. The artist also appears to have some annoyance at showing anything he has made himself.

In a recent interview, he described plans to show recent iPhone photos of flowers spotted in his garden. With a chuckle, he described doing so as a “selfish” act.

Foo was speaking from Venice, where he worked for a show installation at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, an art space known primarily for its holdings of Baroque and Rococo art. (Occasionally, there are also exhibitions of contemporary art there.) This week, those centuries-old paintings will be accompanied by much newer work by Vo, as well as the late modern sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi and painter Park Seo-bo, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday . Working with space curator Chiara Bertola, Fu curated the exhibition, which was chosen as a “living archive” by the two.

Ostensibly, the three contemporary artists have little in common, other than that they are all of Asian descent and are represented by the White Cube Gallery (which was the organizer of the show). Noguchi makes sculptures and designs elegant and elegant things, with lots of allusions to the art of Japan, where his father was born. Park paints the abstractions that made him famous in South Korea. Conceptually minded Vo objects seem a far cry from either case.

When it comes to biographies, the three artists differ sharply as well, although the two are members of the Asian diaspora. In 1979, when he was still a child, Phu fled South Vietnam with his family to the west after the fall of Saigon. Meanwhile, Noguchi was born in Los Angeles 75 years ago, and later spent time in Japan. On the other hand, Park has always been in Korea, although he and his family have been on the move during the first half of the 20th century due to a variety of conflicts on the Korean Peninsula.

When asked to explain the similarities between his life and work and those of Park and Noguchi, Fu objected, “We have a tendency to try to make sense of things. I think we live in a meaningless world. I mean, why are we trying to make sense of it? What we can do is try to control What our daily life means and what the society we live in today expresses. I hope it is personal.”

As it happens, this isn’t the first time Vo has given artwork to others for his own shows. He became famous for this in 2013, when, as part of a Hugo Boss Prize winning show for the Guggenheim Museum, he displayed a collection of ephemera and artwork related to Martin Wong. Wong was an eccentric painter associated with the East Village art scene in the 1980s and died in 1999 of AIDS-related causes. In the nearly 15 years after his death, Wong’s work was not as well known as it is today. Now, however, it is now, thanks to the resulting Vo segment, IMUUR 2It is considered by many to be a classic of its time.

Katherine Brinson, curator of the 2018 Guggenheim Fu Poll, once wrote, With IMUUR 2, Fu was “composing” a work with a built-in identity format. In other words, he was bridging the gap between original and non-original work, between his work and someone else’s work. Could the Fondazione Querini Stampalia show be considered along the same lines? Not quite Fu said.

“I just wanted to take these three traditional mediums, and see what we can take away from these artists from different times,” he said.

When it comes to Noguchi’s work, anyone’s likely natural impulse is to go for his sculptures, which translate modernist abstraction into the third dimension. “People care about that,” Foo said, noting the frequent appearances of the sculptures in various places around the world, including, most recently, the Rose Garden in the White House. Instead, Vo shows the artist’s design elements. In the 1950s, Noguchi began producing his own Akari lamps, which are prized for their ability to transform traditional bulky objects into light and elegance.

Akari appears alongside examples from Park’s popular “Ecriture” series, making him a leading financier of the South Korean movement known as Dansaekhwa. For these works, still-damp parquet blocks of paint were etched onto canvas with thin pencil lines, creating repeating patterns. “They’re really pretty,” said Fu.

Fu pointed out again the photos of the flowers he was producing, which also show a similar low quality. Vo has been taking pictures for the past couple of years, after he was first taken to constantly using the tiny camera in his pocket, thanks to his iPhone. Vung Fu, Danh’s father, is a frequently paid collaborator; Danh Fong once had a Design his own tombstone, which will be shipped from Minneapolis to Denmark upon the death of Vo Beer. Here, Fung wrote the scientific classifications of each flower colored in calligraphy below each picture.

When he first became famous during the late 2000s, Fo was thinking about the many ways in which ordinary things are exposed to complex systems. “I think today, 15 years later, I am more interested because of my lack of knowledge about very simple things,” he said. The Latin scientific terms used below each picture are a reference to these gaps which Vaux, a resident of Berlin, and his gardener, who speaks mostly German, felt almost to the exclusion of any other languages.

Overlays of past and present are common in the world of light-use objects created by Vo, and will be felt in the Fondazione Querini Stampalia as well, where artistic movements, continents and personal history will be bridged. “It’s a good way to set the record straight,” Fu said of the show.