Danh Vo, a Vietnamese Danish artist, has won Hugo Boss Prize – the award honoring young contemporary artists with outstanding achievements, reports VietnamNetBridge.
The award is sponsored by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, United States, and host by the high-end fashion company Hugo Boss in Germany.
Creativity is the most important criterion to be taken into account. In addition, there are no restrictions on age, gender, nationality, forms of artistic expression for the participants. The winner will receive $100,000.
An exhibition displaying the artworks by Danh Vo will be held at the Guggenheim Museum in early 2013.
Oma Totem
The artwork entitled “Oma Totem” helped Vo win the award. The work features a TV set, a washing machine, a refrigerator with a wooden cross. These are items that the program to support the migration of a local church gave Ms. Nguyen Thi Ty, Vo’s grandmother, when she and her family arrived in Denmark in 1980. The children appear in the photo are Vo’s nieces and nephews.
Vo’s Journey
According to ArtTattler.com, Danh Vo was born in the South of Vietnam in 1975. At the age of four, his family fled the country in a homemade boat to USA. However, the refugee family were picked up by a Danish container vessel somewhere on the Pacific.
It is believed that this personal story, the sheer randomness that determined the family’s association with Denmark, and not least the question of how identity is shaped by overall cultural and political conditions have fascinated Danh Vo ever since.
Vo later graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Over the years, he has won great acclaim on the international art scene and has a wide range of prestigious exhibitions to his name, e.g. at the Artist Space in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Kunsthaus Bregenz.
Several museums have acquired his works, including MoMA in New York. He now resides and works in Berlin, Germany.
