Homework, 2023
live performance + installation, 11 minutes. Commission for Queering the Table, an exhibition at the Mingei International Museum. three grass brooms and a wooden chair.
Homework reclaims bodily safety by exposing histories of child abuse in Vietnamese and diasporic immigrant communities. Audiences contemplates how violent discipline is stored in collective skin, and remains repetitively cursed in the body for generational patterning. I re-program body-pain relationships by transforming the object-hood of brooms with somatic sequences of “sweep-walking” and resting. The performance seals with an artist talk where I facilitate a grieving circle through poetry recitation.
can’t you just change jobs, 2024
“She moves both elegantly and ungainly within a performance, rendering moments of both instinctive reaction and designed transcendence. ”
documentation by Tommy Bui
live performance + sculpture, 11 minutes. Debuted at PROJECT [BLANK], a performance exhibition at Bread & Salt + commissioned for the closing performance of 17th Annual Dia de la Mujer at The FRONT Arte & Cultura. 2024. seventeen braided “Thank You” bags into a frozen durian fruit, and an improvised hair pin.
can’t you just change jobs compels audiences with an ode to Vietnamese women and fruit sellers. I release the generational inheritance of lethargy, scarcity, and childbirth by wrestling with a metaphorical ball and chain crafted from supermarket goods. The ritual uses a chant, mua cho bà con ơi / oh child, buy these from me (because I need the money), in repetition as a labor prayer to engage with audience members as passerby customers.
when no one is watching, 2024
documentation by Jun!yi Min
live performance + video installation, 44 minutes after 7 consecutive days on various camming sites. Debut solo exhibition, Trans Aphrodisia, at The Brown Building.
when no one is watching uses the webcam site, Chatroulette, to explore digital intimacy with randomized strangers across the globe. I accept cues from the online male gaze while live audiences survey responses around transphobia/philia. The performance further challenges erotic contracts and expectations while in technological shadows, and how human consciousness morphs to fulfill needs of self-gratification. The online interphase is projected onto walls, creating a cyber-bedroom for audiences to immerse within.
Yet another birth of, 2024
documentation by Krysada Phuonsiri
live performance + installation, 33 minutes after a 30 day sugar fast. Closing performance for Through the Maze, in collaboration with Tarrah Aroonsakool, at The Athenaeum Center. 2024. rice, honey, condensed milk.
Yet another birth of re-myths Aphrodite as trans-Madonna to contemplate the (non)consensual sacrifices of one’s indigeneity for Western assimilation. I echo vocal tones while oscillating through the maze installation, constructed with found objects that reminisce the Asian American household. Upon arriving onto the altar stage, a bathtub awaits where artist, Tarrah Aroonsakool, uses honey and condensed milk as actors of the American Dream — sugar as an agent to freeze the psyche and one’s ancestral memory. The performance invites audience members to pour various liquids on my body, where divinity is stripped in place of the despair.
the wind was just like them, 2024
documentation by Terry Smith
documentation by Sanchez Productions
live performance + installation, 8 minutes. Commission for LIMINAL SPACE at The Mingei International Museum and Disco Riot at Queer Mvmt Festival. 2024. electrical fan, dozen eggs.
the wind was just like them is an interdisciplinary performance that combines live vocals distorted into an electrical fan and experimental movement with a dozen eggs. The ritual-performance uses body languages of trans joy to subconsciously detonate the 35 million landmines still hidden in the countryside of Vietnam after the Vietnam War (1955-1975). With the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I question one’s displaced and diasporic relationship to homeland. Using the traditions of my paternal grandmother, I researches movement languages rooted in Daoism, especially the concept of spirals and unicity, to help express the freedom for re-narrating memories of sudden death.
GIRL VOICE, 2025
“This is not just a performance. It is an invocation. It demands that we listen with more than our ears, to consider how voice and body are policed, fetishized, liberated, and reimagined. It leaves the audience suspended in a liminal space between the known and the wild, the human and the elemental.”
feature with Korean American Voice
live performance + sound installation + social practice, 22 minutes. Feminism Is Not Your Enemy, AHL Foundation. found shell, rabbit fur hide.
GIRL VOICE experiments with the layers of the trans-feminine voice as a bridge for reclaiming indigeneity while contemplating the pressures of gender passibility. I loop a vocal spectrum of cultural history, especially remembering the vibrations of third gender shamans and spirit mediums across the Asian Pacific. The work redefines the socially expected woman’s voice within gallery walls, while the objectified femme-body disrupts the normative gazes of passerby neighbors through a window. Audiences use the prompt, “how’s this for a girl voice” to record their voice into the sound current. As audience voices blend into a range of harmonics and howls, the techno-animist invocation calls upon the breaking of collective dysphoria and one’s disconnection to ancestral gender expression.
braiding the future, 2025
“Our body is molded to fit the land,” fae said. “There’s something about our bodies that we carry a geographical location, a bloodline, something cosmic as well. We don’t carry just memory or trauma. We carry all the past lives we’ve had. We carry all the untold stories that haven’t been expressed yet.”
live performance + social practice, 44 minutes. the land we carry, El Salon at Casa Familiar. red thread.