Take My Breath Away: Danh Võ and the Erotic Detail

This paper offers a meditation on the erotic detail in the work of contemporary artist Danh Võ. Criticism on Võ’s work often attends to the artist’s interrogations of historical memory, his appropriation of culturally charged objects, and his elegant visual discourse on queer and Vietnamese diasporic melancholia. In spite of the fact that his erotic repertoire is woven directly into the otherwise commonly commented upon elements of his practice, the prominent and often violent erotic visual vocabulary of Võ’s work remain relatively underexplored. This paper suggests that the difficulty of the erotic in Võ’s work is its articulation of an always already racialized scene of sexuality that cannot be fully redeemed (or valued) as an abstract, universal expression of “love.” Instead, the sexualities that Võ gestures towards and depicts are visibly rent through with the complex historical particularities and forces that shape sexuality within the overlapping theaters of racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Refusing to offer romantic images of redemptive sex and sexuality, Võ thus reminds us of the complex entanglements between pain and pleasure that flow forth from the racialization of the erotic and the eroticization of racism. Yet in Võ’s erotic detail one also encounters sex as an ambivalent and potentially reparative site where racialized queers may yet work through the often-shattering effects of the historically sedimented interarticulation of sexual pleasure and racial violence.