DANH VŌ | UNTITLED

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

This Corona beer box was found in Mexico, and gilded in Thailand. The work is inscribed on the reverse by the artist’s father with a quotation from Antonin Artaud, translated by Nancy Spero; “Born our of a uterus I had nothing to do with”.

The various inscriptions, stamps and address field refer to the transport of the item from Mexico to Thailand.

A similar work was exhibited in 2018 at Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo. 

Shimmering gold-leaf adorns a flattened and creased cardboard box in Danh Vō’s rigorously conceptual combination of the profane and elegiac. Hidden beneath the resplendent golden gleam, veiled metaphors pervade Untitled. Vō is an artist whose remarkable personal history and complex experience of international identity is inextricable from his work. Born in 1975 his family fled Vietnam when the artist was only four years old, seeking to escape the conflict-ridden country on a makeshift boat. The family was rescued at sea by a Danish container ship, which led them to settle in Denmark. Ever since, the artist has worked and lived in Berlin, New York, Basel, Paris, Vietnam, Brussels, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Bangkok and Mexico City, leading to his nuanced understanding of concepts of cultural identity, migration and heritage that permeates throughout his vast and diverse oeuvre.

Untitled forms part of a critically acclaimed series begun in 2009, consisting primarily of branded cardboard boxes embossed with gold leaf. Reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) and Robert Rauschenberg’s Cardbird series (1971), the present work offers a dialogue between fine art and the ordinary, ephemeral everyday objects. Bearing the weight of commerce and history, the flat-packed ‘Corona Extra’ beer carton, while seemingly innocuous, evokes meaningful and difficult associations for the artist: “I had been in Spain, thinking of beer brands like León, which has the seal of the Spaniards, and Pacifico, which was made because they were trying to seduce people to think it was a quiet ocean to cross … All this information existed within the idea of the beer brands, and it was obvious for me to want to work with them because it was so perverse.” (Danh Vō cited in: Michael Slenske, ‘Uncovering Danh Vō’s Revelatory Practice,’ Blouin Art Info, 22 September 2014, online). The cardboard packaging and its association to commerce further allows the artist to interrogate systems of value and trade, as well as issues of socio-economic globalisation on a personal and political level. Vō collects the discarded consumer goods packaging at the end point of the product’s economic arc and sends it to Thailand, where the gold leaf is painstakingly applied by skilled artisans, referencing the capitalist outsourcing of manual labour to Asia, the devotional gilding techniques associated with the local temples as well as the role of gold as a universal signifier of value. All logos, barcodes and taglines on the cardboard boxes are lavishly gilded in this peculiar process of repurposing the mundane to create new artistic meaning. Juxtaposing the material connotations of gold with the unrefined condition of a discarded relic of mass consumption, Vō’s ironic bricolage is a mordant commentary on consumerism and commercialisation. The present work is as subtle as it is provocative in its ambitious distillation of intensely complex questions into contextually loaded objects. Untitled is a remarkable readymade that skilfully dissects the realities of labour, value and identity at once.