The Noguchi Museum announced on October 6 that Vietnamese-born artist Danh Võ and Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto will receive the 13th Isamu Noguchi Award. The prize, presented each year at the museum's annual benefit, recognizes people working across disciplines whose practice carries forward the experimental ethos associated with Isamu Noguchi. This year's benefit carried extra resonance, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of Noguchi's celebrated Akari light sculptures.

Võ, whose family fled Vietnam during the Cambodian-Vietnamese war of 1978–89 before settling in Denmark, now works between Berlin and Mexico City. His conceptual practice moves across drawing, sculpture, and installation, often built from documents, photographs, and found objects chosen for their emotional or historical weight. Questions of appropriation, identity, and collective memory run through the work, which has appeared at the Venice Biennale in 2013, 2015, and 2019, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2018, and the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris in 2023. The award continues a long dialogue between Võ and Noguchi's legacy: he staged 'Noguchi for Danh Võ: Counterpoint' at the M+ Pavilion in Hong Kong in 2018, 'Take My Breath Away' at SMK in Copenhagen, and is currently presenting 'Danh Võ in Situ: Akari by Noguchi' at M+, which opened in 2024.

Yamamoto, based between Tokyo and Paris, is being honored for a fashion career stretching nearly five decades. His avant-garde, mostly monochromatic garments — marked by asymmetrical cuts and free-flowing silhouettes that fuse Western tailoring with Japanese minimalism — have earned him Japan's Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon in 2004 and France's Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011. Accepting the award, he paid tribute to Noguchi's example of working 'somewhere between things' — between East and West, form and body, strength and fragility, presence and absence — as a model he has followed in his own creative life.