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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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sound essay

THE SEA LIKE THE DESERT DOESN’T QUENCH THE THIRST / PLANET BLAH


Performance for plastic packaging, pop rocks, carbon dioxide, constructed water and air environments, sugar, radio, samples, foley, and Chinese astrology elements (30min)

Watershed Art & Ecology
Chicago, US April 2024

Murmuration Gallery
Chicago,US Dec 2023

︎︎︎https://youtu.be/LveslNJ1KB0

︎︎︎https://youtu.be/jYMZnTlK0vs

A performative sound essay that creates ambiguity between our factual and fictitious sonic environments. Such materials as radio (“air waves”), pop rocks, chemical reactions, sugar, plastic packaging, simulated ocean waves, speech, and astrology readings become the basis for constructing an unstable acoustic experience of environmental sounds. Leaning on traditions of acoustic ecology, foley, performance lectures, and lyric essays, this work subverts expectations of what the environment should, and could, sound like.

When objects are used to re-create environmental sounds — such as when plastic packaging is used to create the sound of a crackling fire, or sugar crystals to create the sound of ocean waves — what, if anything, remains natural in nature sounds? This work uses humour, play, critique, and ambiguity to challenge our settled ways of listening to sonic environments.