2.2.1861

Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo is fascinated by deeply personal objects that intersect with larger histories of migration, displacement, assimilation, and belonging. For 2.2.1861, he asked his father, Phung Vo, to transcribe the last communication from the French Catholic missionary Théophane Vénard to his own father before Vénard was decapitated in 1861 in Vo’s native Vietnam. (His martyrdom was officially recognized by the church when he was canonized as a saint more than a century later, in 1988.) After copying the original French letter in his own exquisite handwriting, Phung Vo mailed it to the AMAM directly, transforming this conceptual work into a work of mail art.

This is not the only copy of the letter that Vo has made for his son. Any collector may purchase a copy, produced to order; the total number of letters in the edition will be determined by Vo’s own lifespan, tethering this work even more closely to questions of life and death.