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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
︎INSTAGRAM
︎INFO

sound

WHISPER WIND WATER

VCCA 2022
Elastic Arts
Chicago, US May 2022
16 speakers, 8 movement improvisers

Vincom Center for Contemporary Art
Hanoi, Vietnam August 2022
4 speakers, 5 dancers

World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Conference
Atlantic Center for the Arts
Florida, US March 2023
4 speakers

Northwestern University 
Chicago, US March 2023
4 speakers                                                                                      
Pivot Center for Art
Cleveland, US May 2024                         
4 speakers   
                                               
Jack Straw New Media Gallery           
Seattle, US 2025 (forthcoming)                  
Sound Installation                                                                                                           
︎︎︎https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPtX2eYM7ns&t=313s

︎︎︎https://sites.saic.edu/gradshow2023/artists/maya-nguyen/?ex=grad2

︎︎︎https://songtre.com.vn/doc-dao-trai-nghiem-trinh-dien-am-thanh-the-nghiem-%E2%80%9Ctham-thi-gio-nuoc%E2%80%9D-p23781.html


An ongoing project for multi-channel, spatialized sound installations and movement improvisation. The artist creates a soundscape of her whispering voice that builds up into textures of wind and water, in response to site-specific habitats. Textures of howling wind, whistling grass, and rippling water emerge from layers of the human voice, reflecting on the human experience of, and effects on, nature.

Dancers create a responsive system to the sound, moving as both individual bodies and as a network of interconnected bodies. Their movements flow – imitating grass that sways gently in the wind, trees being pushed around violently by a storm, or a living sculpture that slowly breathes.

This project would not be possible without the generous and open ears of Paige Naylor and đỗ tường linh; the choreography of Jonas Sun and Minh Hải; the technical expertise of phạm hải đăng, Nathan Wolek, Chris Mercer; support from various institutions; and most importantly to the performers I-chien Chen, Mallory Qiu, Paige Naylor, Veronica Salinas, Linhan Zhang, Mao Chenhui, Polina Shklovskaya, Đỗ Quốc Hưng, Nguyễn Thu Trang, Lơ Mơ, Nguyễn Minh Hằng, Long Cao.