Artist Statement
I create dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. I make art about the life of a Vietnamese desiring America, of a colonized being desiring its colonizer. Foregrounding the unruliness of the body, my work unravels intolerable feelings, wounds, memories, and pleasures. I am occupied with the task of making present the unrepresentable. How can difficult histories be collectively felt with direct emotional charge, subtle provocation, sacrilegious playfulness, and earnest responsibility? The intensity of war draws me into the survival space between life and death, where life is contingent and death is imminent. This intensity is heightened by my experience surviving chronic illness. My work weaves together the erotic thrill of violence and the tenderness of care to push forth the burning desire to be alive.
Anh Vo in "Two Little Kids," as part of Dance and Process, Performance view, American Academy of Arts and Letters, June 3, 2023. Photo by Julieta Cervantes. Courtesy of The Kitchen.