hamsa fae

hamsa fae (b. 1993, Los Angeles) is a Vietnamese American artist working across expanded performance and time based new media. Rooted in a decade of land-based animist practice, she positions the body as a site of re-matriation. Her methodology investigates how networked systems reshape intimacy and our relationship to earth, the screen, and one another. 

Emerging from the political and spiritual mundanity of trans womanhood, she mobilizes the feminine form as an ancestral and digital technology of return. She performs in charged landscapes— from the Californias to livestreaming platforms— activating them as co-performers. Through durational bodily transformation and self-documentation, she questions how bodies are consumed and mediated within economies of gendered labor and desire. 

These place-based relationships are translated into multimedia installations that function as speculative altars and ecological afterlives. Combining organic materials and assembled GIFs, she designs participatory spaces that destabilize binaries between nature and interface. Audiences are invited to kneel, speak, recline, or gather in collective ritual acts that confront the historical erasure of third gender peoples while collapsing the distinction between witness, voyeur, and co-author. 

Her work has been presented across experimental and institutional spaces throughout San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego. She has delivered talks at the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her writing has been published and featured in diaCritics, Transgender Law Center, and the Yale School of the Environment. She is the Founder and Director of the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship in Southern California, where she curates exhibitions, film programming, workshops, and residencies in cultivation of queer, AAPI artistry and visibility.