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MAYA NGUYEN


MN is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound performance and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily life into open-ended works. These often take the shape of performance lecture, sound installation, movement, and video.

But no single material choice defines her practice. Instead, she works through ambiguity and interaction across borders: making a commitment of not committing to just one side, but to a multiplicity of sides; to the mix of different sound channels; to the touch of different bodies. Through these material interactions, she puts power relations in action, focusing on the domestic sphere, colonial histories, movement geographies, and the relating between human and natural worlds.



︎MORE WORK
︎︎︎SOUND ESSAY: A DIASPORIC MAKING
︎INSTAGRAM
︎INFO

sound

I HEAR YOU CAN MAKE A HELICOPTER SOUND WITH A FLOWER


Performance with helicopter foley, domestic instruments, ideological speeches, memes, and curated sound effects (30min)

A Village Before Us
John David Mooney Foundation
Chicago, US Nov 2023

Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project
Convivium 33 Gallery
Cleveland, US May 2024

︎︎︎https://youtu.be/ru8XUmciwiE (clip 1)
︎︎︎https://youtu.be/3uR6vePG5Ns (clip 2)
︎︎︎ https://youtu.be/KcM8YnedUXQ (full)



At the intersection of foley, ideological sound design, cinema sound, and meme aesthetics, this performative sound essay explores the sonic structure of trauma, Hollywood portrayals of the Vietnam War, and empathy through sound. It asks: in a continuously evolving media environment, how do we depict, listen, and respond to the pain of others?