︎
                                                    ︎︎︎    MAIN   INFO    ︎︎︎

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

video

SEASHELLS


Video (06:15min)

Group Exhibition
Yes Projects Chicago, US
Dec 2025 - Feb 2026

Waveforms Festival
 SAIC Sound Department
Online, Jan 2021

︎︎︎https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVtzDnSrLho

An empty shell rocks back and forth on four asynchronous screens, each one slightly displaced from the other in time. Some are known to rock as a way to self-soothe.

This video borrows from the fugue — a compositional technique in classical music where a phrase is introduced by one part and is successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts. The term fugue can be traced back to the latin verbs fugere (“to flee”) and fugare (“to chase”). In the temporal weave of the fugal videos, the image is never at rest. It is always either fleeing from or chasing after itself, opening itself up to chance encounters and potential resonances.