Statue of Liberty What Do People Do at an Art Museum?

Dislocation has been a recurrent theme for the Switzerland-based artist Danh Vo, who in 1979, at age iv, escaped with his family by boat from Vietnam and was eventually granted asylum in Denmark.

Vo—recently declared "ane of the nearly stimulating figures on the international [art] scene" by the New York Times—has reimagined the greatest symbol of the worldwide refugee experience: He is re-creating the Statue of Liberty, piece by massive slice. 1 hundred components are in a traveling exhibition, currently in a 21,000-square-foot space at the National Gallery of Kingdom of denmark in Copenhagen.

He envisions his monumental Statue of Liberty sculptures equally works-in-progress. He estimates that the project is roughly 50 per centum completed. For Smithsonian, he describes the installation's genesis and its underlying significant.

At what betoken in your life did yous offset come across the Statue of Freedom? What did y'all think about information technology?

Actually, I never saw it for real before I started the project. Looking back, I know that at that place were several works that I was rather obsessed with, by artists who had in some ways incorporated the Statue of Liberty.

How did this work come virtually?

Practise you know the museum in Kassel, Germany, the Fridericianum? It's quite a large museum, the first public museum in mainland Europe, established after the French revolution. The curator approached me, suggesting that I showroom in the whole space, usually given over to ii or 3 artists at a time, because the space is that large. He mentioned that he had seen several of my exhibitions —he liked the way that I was able to deal with empty spaces.

When people accept a kind of presumption of what I might practise, or who I am, for that matter, I tend to piece of work against it. I'g like a child—I don't want to be put in a box. So I thought, 'Okay, I better think of a project that could stuff the whole museum with something, really large.' That was basically how information technology came about.

What about the Statue of Liberty grabbed you, in item?

When I began to inquiry the Statue of Liberty, I bumped into this very interesting fact—that she was only the thickness of ii pennies. Suddenly, everything made sense. I saw that I was capable of reproducing the pare [the copper sheathing] only, which was quite interesting.

Physically, how did you become about making such a giant piece?

We were researching sites where the slice could be produced, including sites in China. Another advantage of Communist china was that, in Asia, you still build these colossal Buddhas, and that'southward basically fabricated in this one-time technique of hammering the copper.

To what extent does this piece connect to your personal identity, equally someone who was born in Vietnam and so moved to Federal republic of germany? Was this a comment on your experience?

Of grade, it's naturally connected. That's the construction of the art world—the subject of the piece of work is and so continued to the artist itself. Everybody is doing piece of work from their own personal feel.

Why did you decide to split up the piece of work and send it around the world in this fashion?

I don't remember information technology's necessary that when you lot build a monumental thing, information technology has to exist in one place. It'southward most a conceptual idea—that it exists, but yous never comprehend everything at once.