Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean

Suspended from rafters, the banners formed a giant comic strip, each jacquard-woven square a panel of text amid stark black graphics of plants, birds, the sun. I absorbed the message slowly, neck slightly craned:

DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN WHEN THE WAVES HAVE CEASED AND THE BIRDS ARE QUIET / DO NOT TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN

THEY WILL COME FOR EVERY LAST PIECE OF YOU / UNDER THE GUISE OF GOOD INTENTIONS

THE SUN WILL RISE

FAR AND ABOVE TO ILLUMINATE THEIR HACKING BEAKS DRINKING OUT YOUR MARROW

AND LEFT BONELESS BODILESS, YOU WILL LAUGH

The textiles were woven by the artist Vo Vo and installed at Parallax Art Center as part of Portland’s 2023 Converge 45 triennial. I’d spent two days shuttling between venues, attempting to process a flood of art condensed into the regimented timeline of an all-too ambitious press trip. Vo’s frank language of a brutal hunt and feast cut through the chatter in my head to strike something deeper. There was no explanation of “they,” and yet I recognized those predators. Harnessing the immediacy of the comic form, the tapestries conveyed the dystopia of living in the United States under late-stage capitalism, where our surveilled bodies, denied rest, are picked apart and consumed — a fate perhaps as inevitable as the rising sun.

And yet, Vo assures, we survive.

Vo is not a defeatist. Their practice — spanning textiles, sculpture, music, and performance — confronts the systemic violences of imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, police brutality, immigration law, racial and surveillance capitalism, and other entrenched legacies of the United States. But it also empowers, while acknowledging feelings of exhaustion or helplessness.

A lifelong anarchist and educator, Vo braids their art-making with direct action — through trauma-response work, deescalation training, strike organizing, or mutual aid with groups like Portland Action Medics and Snack Bloc. Their art is a vehicle not only for dissent but also healing. This integrated, sustained approach offers a model for those uncertain of the role of art in our era of entwined crises, or those skeptical of any such role at all.

The question Vo always starts from is: What do you want your art to do?

The question Vo always starts from is: What do you want your art to do? “When you answer that, it determines who it’s for, and therefore where it should be, who should or shouldn’t have ownership of it,” they say. “The work for me is about what’s necessary to my immediate neighborhood or community.” Much of Vo’s work is created with the home in mind — notions of the personal, safety, place-making: blankets to warm and comfort, tapestries to insulate and politicize a space. Past works have featured such varied imagery as a burning police station, motifs of historic labor strikes, and surrealist, escapist scenes of time and interiority. At the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, Vo exhibited a tapestry with a geometric black hole overlaid on a keffiyeh pattern, reading “SETTLER COLONIAL LOGIC” and “HIGHEST COST / NO TIME.” A rift of unwoven threads down the center suggested both the all-consuming framework of settler colonialism and the possibility of repair from this destructive, seemingly inescapable void.

While their work articulates collective struggles, it is rooted in personal experience, as someone whose life has often been at the whims of bureaucracy. Born in Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Vietnamese refugees, Vo has lived much of their life unmoored. In 1990, nine years after they were born, their family moved to Australia, believing it would increase their chances of securing visas to the United States. Vo’s parents received their green cards in 2002, but Vo’s application was rejected because they had just turned 21. “I was told when I was eight that I’d be moving to the States in a few months,” they say. “My dad would be like ‘Don’t make friends, don’t apply for school.’ They told me that until my mid-twenties. So I floated around because I was told to wait.”

Those years of limbo were spent teaching and doing social work in Mexico, Nepal, Vietnam, Berlin, and London. In 2014, Vo settled in Portland — the longest they’ve lived anywhere. It took yet another six years of processing and two rejections before they were granted US citizenship. That year, amid COVID lockdowns, they taught themself to weave. Vo was forbidden as a child to draw and had begun making zines and comics in their twenties; weaving extended that narrative form into something “more satisfying, bigger,” they say.

Vo’s early weavings addressed the turmoil of a public health epidemic, the first Trump presidency, and the uprisings of Black Lives Matter and ensuing state violence in Portland. More recently, as they’ve witnessed the US-backed genocide in Palestine and growing policing and militarization across US cities, including Portland — from public-camping bans to immigration raids — they have been making work about displacement and the intergenerational trauma of this subjugation. Weavings of a bed composed of disparate beds, of windows and doors to nowhere, of a building swept up by ominous gusts were featured this summer in Of ev rywh re and n wh re, Vo’s solo exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery. The show explored what they call “refugeehood — the state of being ready to run or pack up. It’s the hypervigilance of never feeling like you are allowed to settle, maybe because of past experiences where you were bombed out of where you lived.” A wooden bench inscribed with a poem about Vo’s late grandmother sliced through the gallery; one half of the seat was obstructed by hostile architecture, the other rested on dirt, documents, and a camouflage pattern — a spill or exhumation of war and its casualties.

Central to Vo’s practice is a radical prioritization of people over their art itself.

Central to Vo’s practice is a radical prioritization of people over their art itself. “It’s not a visual thing for me,” they say. “It’s always a social thing.” During their exhibition at Elizabeth Leach, they used the gallery for a mentorship workshop for queer and trans youth experiencing homelessness. For the 2024 biennial, they administered care sessions for the public, inviting visitors to receive life coaching, a massage, or just decompress at a private carpet-adorned space. The sessions provided something simple yet precious: the resource of time, a chance to recalibrate.

Rest alone is not resistance, but Vo understands its place in movement-building. “Post-pandemic, if you continue to work in isolation, you burn out faster,” they say. “If you can be in community, you trust people will follow through, and that may help sustain things.” Change, they add, is glacial. “But my political idealism is really believing that things can shift.”

Increasingly, art can seem ineffectual in a world of growing authoritarianism. The rise of politically oriented exhibitions with no real stakes — what critic Rahel Aima calls “vaporwave curating,” or “curating in the passive voice” — only sharpens this collective feeling that we are tired: all ideas, no action. Looking beyond these well-meaning but institutionally bound gestures can reveal the fiercely responsive, risk-taking work of individuals like Vo. Vo tunnels through political inertia because they create, with and without the “art world,” to directly support the life-and-death realities of people around them. For them, art is an engine, a sledgehammer, the last word. Even if boneless, bodiless, we can laugh.