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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.



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LAND / WATER


Land / Water: A Chronicle of Vietnamese as a Diasporic Condition

If the Vietnamese language is what it is today in large part through the influence of Chinese imperial powers, Portuguese missionaries, French colonizers, American fighters, and global diasporas, what of it is, in the end, Vietnamese?

This poetic essay responds by positing the condition of being Vietnamese as inherently a diasporic condition. Guided by the central thread of đất nước — literally “land water” the Vietnamese word for “country” that embodies in its two syllables a central rift — this essay charts the meandering development of the Vietnamese language through a geographic and literary cartography. Weaving quotations, fragments, lyric, and reflections all the way back from Vietnam's creation myth, its history within Imperial China, French colonialism, American War, and to the contemporary diaspora, the country and its language is shown to be deeply tied to that of other people, not in spite of, but because of the Vietnamese way. To be Vietnamese is to embody a porous border between land and water, independence and co-dependence, nationality and relationality.

This essay was published in its first form online in 2020 by Asymptote — an online journal of literature in translation. It was edited by Xiao Yue Shan, and included still images from Landscape Series #1 (2013) by filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi.