photo by Ell Treese
hamsa fae (b. Los Angeles) is a Vietnamese-American artist who works across expanded performance, time based media, and socially engaged art.
With a decade of practice in land-based animism, she positions the body as a site of re-matriation. Her work emerges from the political and spiritual mundane of trans womanhood. She mobilizes live streaming, durational bodily transformation, and the nude form as instruments of protest. Past works engage land sites as co-performers: creeks in Mount Shasta, volcanic rock walls in Hawai’i, and coastlines in San Diego. She invites audiences to participate in her site-specific interventions, archiving collective ritual to confront the erasure of third gender peoples.
Her eco-performances extend into video and sound installations that function as contemporary altars and afterlives. Drawing on internet nostalgia and post-Anthropocene aesthetics, she re-animates organic materials with technological interfaces to disrupt relationships between observer and screen. Reclining, kneeling, or gazing upwards, the audience completes her work. Intimacy becomes a controlled environment where the body negotiates power with surveillance.
