Honoring Legendary Designer Yohji Yamamoto and Artist Danh Vo

by · WWD
Yohji YamamotoCourtesy image

CREATIVE GIANTS: Yohji Yamamoto and Danh Vo received the Isamu Noguchi Award last week at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum annual benefit.

The honorees were recognized for “singular, multidisciplinary practices that embody Isamu Noguchi’s spirit of experimentation, artistic integrity and cross-cultural exchange,” the museum indicated.

Danh VoYvonne Tnt/BFA.com

Vo accepted the award from museum director Amy Hau, who noted the artist’s sustained artistic dialogue with Noguchi’s work, including his presentations incorporating Akari and other works by Noguchi at M+ in Hong Kong, Mudam Luxembourg and Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Vo’s practice brings objects, architecture, design, history and cultural memory into new relationships, creating environments intended to be experienced.

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Yamamoto, who couldn’t attend the event, was honored through a special film where he reflected on Noguchi’s ability to create “a language that opened up a space between East and West, and therefore beyond. For more than five decades, Yamamoto challenged accepted ideas of fashion, beauty, fit, proportion, gender and silhouette, and is recognized for his avant-garde, deconstructed, oversize styles, signature use of black and master tailoring.”

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Ho fled Vietnam in 1979 with his family on a small handmade boat and was rescued by a Danish freighter, which brought him to Denmark, where he grew up. He is considered a contemporary conceptual artist whose work explores themes of migration, colonialism and being gay. He has had many major exhibitions around the world, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Venice Biennale representing Denmark.

The annual benefit is the museum’s most important fundraising event, supporting its exhibitions, education programs, care for the world’s largest collection of Noguchi’s work and the preservation of the artist’s archives and spaces. The event also marked the 75th anniversary of Akari, Noguchi’s iconic light sculptures. Guests gathered for cocktails in the museum’s sculpture garden and first-floor galleries before the award ceremony, which was led by Hau and board chair Susan Kessler. Among the guests was Ambassador Satoshi Katahira, consul general of Japan in New York.