Danh Vo

Danh Vo was born in 1975 in Bà Rịa, Vietnam. In 1979, his family fled Vietnam by boat and were rescued by a Danish freighter, which led to their resettlement in Denmark, where Vo grew up and later became a Danish citizen. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, roughly from 1998 to 2002, and continued as a guest student at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, roughly from 2002 to 2004. No source consulted documents a completed degree from either school.

Vo's practice works through appropriation, fragmentation, and personal history. His best-known project, We The People, is a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty cut into more than two hundred individual copper fragments, several of which have been shown and sold separately since 2011; a group of fragments was commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York, in 2014. Another recurring body of work, Vo Rosasco Rasmussen, restages his own repeated legal marriages and name changes to probe questions of citizenship, intimacy, and the state. He has also worked extensively with inherited and found objects, from his father's calligraphy to gold leaf and church furnishings, treating personal and institutional archives as raw material.

Vo represented Denmark at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2015 and has participated in the Berlin Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, the Singapore Biennale, and the Shanghai Biennial. He currently lives and works between Berlin, where he keeps a farm called Güldenhof, and Mexico City.

Critical and curatorial attention converged on Vo early, anchored by his 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which came with a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2013 and a further show at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris the same year. That recognition, of an artist working across nations, languages, and legal identities, has anchored the critical discussion of his work since, through his 2015 Danish Pavilion at Venice, the 2018 traveling survey Take My Breath Away at the Guggenheim and SMK Copenhagen, and his 2023 presentation at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. Commentary consistently treats his fragmentary appropriations, of monuments, scripture, and his own family's paperwork, as a sustained inquiry into migration, colonialism, and the instability of official narratives.

Vo's auction high is VJ Star (2010), which sold for GBP 602,500 (about USD 930,000) at Phillips London in October 2015; the price is corroborated across Phillips's own sale record, Artnet's market reporting, and MutualArt's aggregate high figure, though the exact day of sale is not specified in the sources consulted. A more recent, smaller transaction is a detail from We The People, which sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong for HKD 960,000 (about USD 122,700) around 29 March 2026, down from USD 178,400 when the same fragment last sold in 2021. Vo's market is better understood through museum acquisition and gallery placement than through a deep or consistent auction history; secondary-market volume for his work remains modest relative to his institutional profile.

Vo's auction history is thin relative to his museum presence, anchored by a single confirmed high, VJ Star at Phillips London in 2015, rather than a deep or continuous sales record. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authenticity questions are best directed to his galleries, including Marian Goodman Gallery, kurimanzutto, White Cube, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, several of which maintain current exhibition records for the artist. Many of his most significant works, including elements of We The People, exist in multiple, dispersed fragments, which means collectors should expect gallery-level verification of a fragment's place within the larger project rather than a single unified object history.