In his work, Danh Vo proposes that you don’t necessarily have to have made an object in order to call it your own. The very typewriter that the Unabomber used to pen his manifestos was included in his 2018 Guggenheim Museum retrospective, as was a chair used by a member of the Kennedy administration. Neither of these objects would have been out of place in a history museum. In Vo’s hands, however, they become art.
And so it can be somewhat alarming when Vo crafts anything at all, no matter how amateurish it is. The artist, too, seems to feel a bit of discomfort with showing anything that he personally has made.