Danh Vo: Chicxulub; Flow review artists of the floating world – The Guardian

My heart stopped to see a familiar letter in this deeply affecting new show by Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo. It was written in 1861, by a French missionary imprisoned in Vietnam. He is in a cage and about to be beheaded. Yet he wishes to reassure his dear father back home that this is nothing: only the cutting of one more flower in the worlds magnificent garden.

The letter is so beautiful as to be a consolation in itself. But what will strike any visitor, seeing it framed on the wall, is that the handwriting appears curiously fluid and modern. It has in fact been immaculately transcribed by the artists own father, a Vietnamese calligrapher underemployed in Denmark because he cannot easily read European script. Phung Vo will continue to copy the letter as long as he is able (anyone can commission him, and many have). It is eight years since I last saw one of his copies, so this version is both artwork and proof of life. Vo senior is still working as a calligrapher.

There is nothing didactic about his art. All is in the air, circling, pensive, delicately elegiac

This generous empathy is characteristic of Danh Vo (pronounced Yon Vo). Walk into White Cube and you are immediately embraced in the warm glow of a wood-fired stove, one of several connected by pipes through the gallery. The atmosphere is gentle, the lighting low and each room contains a combination of wood, in various forms, and living flowers; both as it were from that same magnificent garden.

A whole tree is propped up in one room, its arms reaching for the walls as if about to topple. Its leaves are already turning gold, and autumn scents the air. But the tree does not fall, propped up by a makeshift structure of raw logs. The missionarys letter is hanging alongside, around head height, as if this tree might be what the doomed man could see through the bars of his cage.

Beyond it the room spreads open but empty, as if ready for your thoughts. Turning to leave, you notice more wood high up by the ceiling. This turns out to be the worm-eaten fragment of some ancient crucifixion: Christs torso carved out of the wood to which it now reverts, barely recognisable as a sculpture. But what is the body, after all, if not a kind of tree?

Everything is connected, by substance, form and history. A photograph from 1979 shows the four-year-old Vo and his tiny siblings at Christmas; he is wearing a nugatory paper hat. A cheery seasonal message runs beneath. But Vo and his family were boat people, living in a refugee camp in Singapore. The hat is poignant; all they can manage with a scrap of paper. But the adult Vo makes more. The hat takes shape, multiplying into a diaphanous light sculpture, evocative of paper lanterns as well as rice paper. Every memory is changed by the future.

Vo was working on this show in a farmhouse in Germany when the coronavirus took hold. The largest gallery is a kind of indoor Eden of nasturtiums, sage and salvia sprouting from other wooden relics beer and milk crates, further sculptural fragments in the artists studio. All is kept alive by more low-hanging lights. The sight is both eerie and comforting; just the way we have all tried to make something out of nothing during the pandemic, nurturing plants in cans, pots and window boxes. Except that some of these objects are Christian icons, shattered, repurposed, perhaps redeemed giving new life to the world.

Vos attitude to European Catholicism is evidently ambivalent. He uses stained glass windows of the three wise men as doors, at one point, so that we are eye to eye with some very fanciful representations of oriental men. But the most moving work here is another Christian fragment: the nailed feet of Christ positioned inside a chiller cabinet. The violence of the crucifixion is devastatingly invoked in the exquisitely sculpted ankles and toes, but so too are memories of hospitals and morgues during the pandemic; the bodies of the dead waiting for burial.

It is possible that the burning wood that gives visitors such a welcome also alludes to the forest fires ravaging the globe. Certainly, a great supply of logs banked up to make a wall takes the form of a US flag. And when, for Vo and his family, does a hearth really become a home?

But there is nothing didactic about his art. All is in the air, circling, pensive, delicately elegiac. Outside, he has built a temple out of raw logs, where lavender, zinnia and a few late cosmos are still heroically blossoming among thickets of weeds. It is an improvisation we all know, standing in for a place of worship and shelter.

Flow is an online exhibition exploring the theory of the flow state at Modern Art Oxford. This means being so immersed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of everything else around you; an antidote to the intense and time-wasting distraction experienced by so many of us these days.

Mark Clay has a mesmerising ink drawing of what it is to be mesmerised, effectively: the grooves of a record interrupted by a crack to become a kind of abstract landscape. Simon Mandarino has used his feet to draw a beautiful scroll that extends up into the sky. David Gascas black and white film of a street dance slows it into a hypnotic trance.

There are works here by scientists, potters and poets as well as artists, all of them intent on the visualisation of a captivated state of mind. Many draw the eye into some complicated path or pattern, while others bring the outdoors inside. Saskia Saunderss delicate piece, The Space Within, spins a teasel out of threads and plants this beguiling structure within a Stonehenge of pins a miniature civilisation in a humble yet fascinating show.

Star ratings (out of five)Danh Vo Flow

Danh Vo: Chicxulub is at White Cube Bermondsey, London until 2 November

Flow is at Modern Art Oxford until 11 October

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Danh Vo: Chicxulub; Flow review artists of the floating world - The Guardian