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MAYA NGUYEN



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

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 exposes power relations inherent in human interaction and the environments that facilitate these interactions, focusing on the domestic sphere, colonial histories, migratory routes, and the relating between the human and the natural world.



︎MORE WORK
︎︎︎SOUND ESSAY: A DIASPORIC MAKING
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LAND / WATER


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

Editor’s Statement (Xiao Yue Shan): The journey that a language takes to arrive at us is often unimaginably intricate, with all the marks of history, people, and land upon it. In the following essay, gorgeous with lyricism and intimate with the facts and ideas of past and present, Maya Nguen takes us through the emotional and physical cartography of Vietnam and its language, and how such structures reverberate against the ever-mutable definitions of identity, personhood, and home.