Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico City Acquired from the above by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
Danh Vo is a self-proclaimed collector of ruins and fragments. Born in Vietnam in 1975, the subsequent Communist victory forced his family to flee on a handmade boat, eventually seeking political asylum in Denmark. Without any recollection of his early childhood in Vietnam, Vo quickly assimilated into Danish culture. His art, whether performance based or hand-produced, represents an emotionally-charged exploration of his own identity, the ephemeral definitions of ethnicity and belonging in an increasingly interconnected world and the dichotomy between private and shared histories. In Mezcal Union Vo has deconstructed cultural material, from the boxes that store personal objects and memories to the corporate logo of high-end Mezcal Union, creating an entirely new, albeit fragmented object. Amidst the cardboard and gilded lettering are untold stories, connections and interpretations. Vo’s talent is in amalgamating the hidden histories and meanings of these objects into one. As he describes it, ‘To me, things come out of the continuous dialog you have with your surroundings, I need that in order to work, and in this dialog things often come to me by chance and you just have to catch them at the right moment…’.
