What: The Hugo Boss Prize: Danh Vo, I M U U R 2
When: March 15 – May 27, 2013
Where: The Guggenheim, 1071 5th Avenue, New York
Why This Show Matters: As the winner of the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo received a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, in addition to a $100,000 cash prize. Rather than filling the museum’s fifth-floor gallery with his own works, Vo has created an homage to the late, iconic New York artist Martin Wong.
Wong’s eclectic oeuvre spanned street portraits, paintings of buildings and life on the Lower East Side in the ’80s and ’90s, numerous collaborations with the Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero, and a massive collection of intentional and unintentional cultural artifacts. Though Vo wasn’t exposed to the artist’s work until after Wong’s death of AIDS in 1999, after later acquiring one of his works, Vo became fascinated with the artist, eventually meeting and getting to know the mother, Florence Wong Fie, with whom Wong was exceptionally close.
Through his relationship with Wong Fie, Vo discovered that she and Wong had amassed a vast collection of Americana and other, related ephemera throughout their lives. For this exhibition, thousands of those objects — from cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers to a Patty Hearst wanted poster to dice of all shapes and sizes — are meticulously curated in dozens of cubbies and shelves lining the Guggenheim’s walls.
Like Wong’s work, the exhibition is at once a celebration and critique of America, including hundreds of tchotchkes that stand out as sharp reminders of the country’s historic racism and stereotyping. Cheap Chinese figurines and blackface figures eating watermelon or wearing aprons are placed alongside banal objects like cookie jars and Mickey Mouse statues.
The exhibition’s title “I M U U R 2,” was Wong’s shorthand for “I am you and you are too,” a slogan printed on the artist’s business cards and stamps. It is a fitting title for this show by Vo, whose work is focused on ideas of cultural identity, the forces that shape it, and how it influences personal experiences. Through appropriating Wong’s effects, “I M U U R 2” exemplifies the ways in which shared emotional experiences can transcend generational and cultural differences.