Bio
Thao Anh Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist and architect from Hanoi, Vietnam. She is currently based in Providence, RI, USA. She is pursuing a degree in Painting and Interior Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, with a minor in the Belief track of History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. Her interest lies in the socio-political discourse that encompasses her experience of belonging to both the dominant (Kinh) and minor (Tay) ethnic groups in Vietnam.
Her artistic practice revolves around recontextualizing the relational dynamics and material constructs of spiritual practices to question the conditions of what it means to be animated. She explores the boundaries between human and animal, natural body and cyborg, probing the essential question: who gets to decide what is alive, and in what sense? Can land and nature possess their own animacy, with souls of their own, equating them in value with human life? She believes that the concept of animacy has the potential to transform biopolitical spheres, offering a way to rethink and challenge entrenched binary systems of difference, such as life/death, subject/object, and speech/nonspeech. Her paintings are deeply influenced by my investigation into Vietnamese shamanism, incorporating its allegories, materials, and performances. This inquiry allows her to communicate across various languages, destabilizing distinctions between modern and pre-modern, body and mind, and life and death. Her work draws from both material concerns and philosophical, political, and spiritual frameworks—such as Mel Y. Chen's Animacy, Michel Foucault's Heterotopia, and Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life—as well as traditional Vietnamese performances like Hát bội, Hát Tuồng, and Hát Then.