Homework, 2023

live performance, 11 minutes. Commission for Queering the Table, an exhibition at the Mingei International Musuem. 2023

Homework reclaims bodily safety by exposing histories of child abuse in Vietnamese culture. The performance contemplates how violent discipline is stored in collective skin, and remains repetitively cursed in the body for systemic patterning. The work creates a ceremony space where audiences can grieve repressed pain, and process the future of parent and guardianship.

found objects — three grass brooms and a wooden chair.

can’t you just change jobs, 2024

“Her movements are both elegant and ungainly, rendering moments for both instinctive reaction and designed transcendence.”

— Seth Combs of the San Diego Union Tribune

live performance, 11 minutes. Debuted at PROJECT [BLANK}, a performance exhibition at Bread & Salt + commissioned for the closing performance of 17th Annual Dia de la Mujer at The FRONT Arte & Cultura. 2024

can’t you just change jobs compels audiences with an ode to Vietnamese women and fruit sellers. The work releases the generational inheritance of lethargy, scarcity, and childbirth for survival. The work sings the words, mua cho bà con ơi / oh child, buy these from me (because I need the money), in repetition as a prayer to engage with audience members as passerby customers.

found objects — seventeen braided “Thank You” bags into a frozen durian fruit, and an improvised hair pin.

when no one is watching, 2024

live performance, 44 minutes. Debut solo exhibition, Trans Aphrodisia, at The Brown Building. 2024

when no one is watching uses the webcam site, Chatroulette, to explore the sexualization of the trans body with randomized strangers. The work experiments with the online male gaze while live audiences survey responses around transphobia and gender politics. The performance further challenges intimacy contracts and expectations while in technological shadows, and how human consciousness morphs to fulfill needs of self-gratification.

installation — various screens and projections to function as a cyber meta mirror for Fae’s subconscious digital world alongside poems from Blood Frequency (2022).

Yet another birth of, 2024

site specific live performance, 33 minutes. Closing performance for Through the Maze, in collaboration with Tarrah Aroonsakal, at The Athenaeum Center. 2024

The maze installation is made up of found objects that reminisce the Asian American household — to offer audiences a journey through neo-patriotism, whitewashing, and anti-blackness. The work uses the cultural mythology of Aphrodite as trans body to gesture the patriarchal systems for colonization, especially the (non)consensual sacrifices of one’s indigeneity for Western assimilation. Fae fasts sugar for thirty days to use honey and condensed milk as performers of the American Dream — sugar as an agent to freeze the psyche and one’s agency. The performance space mimics an altar, where divinity is stripped in place of despair.

the wind was just like them, 2024

live performance, 11 minutes. Commission for LIMINAL SPACE at The Mingei International Museum. 2024

the wind was just like them is an interdisciplinary performance that combines vocal sounds distorted into an electrical fan, with experimental movement using eggs. The live performance contemplates the peaceful detonation of the 35 million landmines still hidden in the countryside of Vietnam after the Vietnam War (1955-1975). The site specific work engages audiences by using a clear glass window as a voyeuristic bridge to question one’s connection to homeland from a diasporic perspective. She uses movements researched from Daoism, especially the concept of spirals and unicity, to help express the joy and freedom that comes from re-narrating memories of sudden death. The performance uses body as a surrogate for remembering ancestry, and the possibilities beyond gender binary systems. Fae believes that the apparent trans body is a reflection of the modernization of land, and futurism of indigeneity.