Vietnamese-born artist Danh Võ and Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto have been announced as the recipients of the thirteenth Isamu Noguchi Award. Inaugurated in 2014 by the Noguchi Museum in New York, the annual prize honors individuals who share Noguchi’s innovative spirit and commitment to creativity. The pair were presented with the award at an October 6 benefit at the museum, joining previous winners including David Adjaye, Tadao Ando, Cai Guo-Qiang, Norman Foster, Rei Kawakubo, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Born in Bà Ria, Vietnam, in 1975, Võ fled the country with his family in 1979 and grew up in Denmark. His youthful experiences of flight and cultural assimilation inform a great deal of his work, which centers themes of belonging, identity, and collective memory. Võ, whose practice additionally spans drawing, painting, and sculpture is known for highly conceptual installations incorporating documents, photos, and found objects. He is a three-time participant in the Venice Biennale (2013, 2015, and 2019) and has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018) and the Pinault Collection at Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2023). In the past decade, he has mounted a number of exhibitions placing his own work in dialogue with that of Noguchi, the most recent being “Danh Võ in Situ: Akari by Noguchi” at M+ in Hong Kong (2024–).
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Yamamoto was born in Tokyo in 1943. As a young man, he abandoned a prospective legal career to assist his mother with her dressmaking business, becoming a master tailor. Sometimes called the “poet of black,” he is known for simple, sophisticated clothes that ignore the traditional boundaries of gender. He launched his first label, Y’s, in 1972 and showed the inaugural runway collection of his Yohji Yamamoto label in 1981, at Paris’s Fashion Week. Yamomoto is today considered one of the world’s most influential fashion designers. Among those with whom he has collaborated are sneaker brand Adidas, filmmakers Wim Wenders and Takeshi Kitano, the Opera de Lyon and the Wagner Opera, the Pina Bausch Company and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. He was awarded France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011.