GIRL VOICE, 2025
feature with Korean American Voice (NYC)
documentation by Phillip Byrne (Los Angeles)
live performance + sound installation + social practice, 22 minutes. Feminism Is Not Your Enemy, AHL Foundation + Commission for Water + Power. found shell, rabbit fur hide, sheep skin.
“Drawing on ancestral sonic traditions of shamans and ritualists from the Asian Pacific, hamsa channels these spiritual vibrations through a contemporary, hyper-sensual lens, interrogating the social contracts inscribed onto the femme body and, more specifically, the femme voice. The performance unfolds as both ritual and reckoning. Using her voice as the primary medium, hamsa traverses a wide spectrum of sounds—from ethereal hums to guttural howls—each carefully modulated to disrupt normative expectations of gendered vocality. Her soundscape hovers between the sacred and the subversive, asking: What is a “girl voice”? Who gets to define it?
Audience participation becomes a vital part of the experience. Viewers are invited to record themselves responding to the prompt: “How’s this for a girl’s voice?” hamsa then collects and layers these disparate recordings into a growing choral composition. The result is a chaotic yet strangely harmonic symphony—a wild, multi-voiced harmony that celebrates vocal multiplicity and defies binary constraints. This collaborative aspect of the work serves as a reclamation of voice in both the literal and metaphorical sense, with each layer adding texture to a collective cry for recognition, liberation, and presence.
Her bodily movements are as much a part of the piece as her voice. As she howls, growls, and sniffs, the space transforms. It feels as though the gallery becomes a living forest—one where instinct, intuition, and identity merge with nature’s raw energy. Her intent is to reconnect the human voice to land, to the grounding forces of nature, and to the cyclical processes of death, renewal, and regeneration.
Visually, the performance is equally arresting. Draped in a translucent veil of pale grey fabric, her body becomes a shifting silhouette, fragile and ethereal. As she wraps herself in mic wire, binding and unbinding, it evokes a surreal, almost mythic image: a figure caught between entanglement and emancipation. The wire, both a conduit of voice and a symbol of restraint, underscores the performance’s tension between visibility and silencing, connection and captivity.
hamsa fae’s piece is not just a performance—it is an invocation. It demands that we listen with more than our ears, to consider how voice and body are policed, fetishized, liberated, and reimagined. It leaves the audience suspended in a liminal space between the known and the wild, the human and the elemental.” — Curator, Joyce Chung
The voices of participating audiences includes Asia Stewart, Mark Hepworth, Luwin Changco, Horus Porras, Lena Chen, Souen Bae, Ibuki Kuramochi, Yuqing, and Jared Hoffman (New York) + Beatrice Gosse, Dylan Tescher, Jane Die, and haven luya (Los Angeles).
when no one is watching, 2024
documentation by Jun!yi Min
live performance + video installation, 44 minutes after 7 consecutive days performing on various camming sites. Debut solo exhibition, Trans Aphrodisia, at The Brown Building.
when no one is watching uses the webcam platform Chatroulette to investigate digital intimacy with randomized strangers across the globe. Through real-time encounters, I mirror the physical and verbal cues of online male users while live audiences witness the spectrum of responses—ranging from fetishism to transphobia. The performance probes the unspoken erotic contracts that form in technological shadows, examining how human consciousness shifts to meet needs of self-gratification. The live interface is projected across the walls, transforming the space into a cyber-bedroom where spectators can inhabit the intimate terrain between anonymity, desire, and surveillance.
R U REAL, 2025
livestream performance, 3 hours and 20 minutes on Chaturbate. Mad World at Loop Art Critique, Mud Foundation + The Wrong Biennale. Curated as an experimental video installation at tiat in 2026.
R U REAL is a durational livestream performance from my ongoing project, worship the dolls, meditating on cyber systems of erotic labor within the sanctity of a (trans) girl’s bedroom. During the performance, I tweeze leg hairs for three hours while engaging over 500 viewers through text and webcam interphase. Participants are allowed to share their cameras, tip, and inquire for private messaging during the performance. Through screen-based ritual, I explore how online spectatorship might shift exploitation into power-switched voyeurism—how watching itself might become an act of devotion, or a form of “worship" to keep trans identity preserved.
the wind was just like them, 2024
documentation by Terry Smith
documentation by Sanchez Productions
live performance + installation, 8 minutes. Commission for LIMINAL SPACE at The Mingei International Museum and Disco Riot at Queer Mvmt Festival. 2024. electrical fan, dozen eggs.
the wind was just like them is an interdisciplinary performance that combines live vocals distorted into an electrical fan and experimental movement with a dozen eggs. The ritual-performance uses body languages of trans joy to subconsciously detonate the 35 million landmines still hidden in the countryside of Vietnam after the Vietnam War (1955-1975). With the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I question one’s displaced and diasporic relationship to homeland. Using the traditions of my paternal grandmother, I research Daoist martial patterns, especially the concept of spirals and unicity, to help express the freedom for re-narrating memories of sudden death.
Homework, 2023
live performance + installation, 11 minutes. Commission for Queering the Table, an exhibition at the Mingei International Museum. three grass brooms and a wooden chair.
Homework reclaims bodily safety by exposing histories of child abuse in Vietnamese and diasporic immigrant communities. Audiences contemplates how violent discipline is stored in collective skin, and remains repetitively cursed in the body for generational patterning. I re-program body-pain relationships by transforming the object-hood of brooms with somatic sequences of “sweep-walking” and resting. The performance seals with an artist talk where I facilitate a grieving circle through poetry recitation.
can’t you just change jobs, 2024
documentation by Tommy Bui
“She moves both elegantly and ungainly within a performance, rendering moments of both instinctive reaction and designed transcendence. ”
live performance + sculpture, 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. seventeen braided “Thank You” bags into a frozen durian fruit, and an improvised hair pin.
can’t you just change jobs compels audiences with an ode to Vietnamese women and fruit sellers. I release the generational inheritance of lethargy, scarcity, and childbirth by wrestling with a metaphorical ball and chain crafted from supermarket goods. The ritual uses a chant, mua cho bà con ơi / oh child, buy these from me (because I need the money), in repetition as a labor prayer to engage with audience members as passerby customers.
Yet another birth of, 2024
documentation by Krysada Phuonsiri
live performance + installation, 33 minutes after a 30 day sugar fast. Closing performance for Through the Maze, in collaboration with Tarrah Aroonsakool, at The Athenaeum Center. 2024. rice, honey, condensed milk.
Yet another birth of re-myths Aphrodite as trans-Madonna to contemplate the (non)consensual sacrifices of one’s indigeneity for Western assimilation. I echo vocal tones while oscillating through the maze installation, constructed with found objects that reminisce the Asian American household. Upon arriving onto the altar stage, a bathtub awaits where artist, Tarrah Aroonsakool, uses honey and condensed milk as actors of the American Dream — sugar as an agent to freeze the psyche and one’s ancestral memory. The performance invites audience members to pour various liquids on my body, where divinity is stripped in place of the despair.
braiding the future, 2025
“Our body is molded to fit the land,” fae said. “There’s something about our bodies that we carry a geographical location, a bloodline, something cosmic as well. We don’t carry just memory or trauma. We carry all the past lives we’ve had. We carry all the untold stories that haven’t been expressed yet.”
live performance + social practice, 44 minutes. the land we carry, El Salon at Casa Familiar. red thread.