Sea of Fertility (After Mishima)

Born in Vietnam in 1975, Danh Vo escaped the Vietnam War in 1979 in a boat built by his father, before growing up in Denmark. Marked by this episode, his work examines the paradoxes of history. Sea of Fertility (after Mishima) consists of a page from the artist’s Danish passport, decorated with the earliest known image of Jesus Christ from Denmark, of around 1 000 AD, testifying to the Viking encounter with Christianity. It is set in a frame against a sheet of wallpaper whose motifs are derived from plants collected in the second half of the 19th century, in South China and Tibet, by the missionary Jean-André Soulié, later executed by the Tibetans. These narratives are here interweaved, questioning the validity of the separation of the political and spiritual spheres.