Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen, Vietnam/Canada

Lives and works in Québec City, Canada

Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen is a 1.75-generation, multidisciplinary (or un-disciplinary) Vietnamese artist who has renounced the “Thi” in her name (which indicates gender).

Originally from a small village in central Vietnam, she grew up in Montreal and studied Fine Arts at Cégep de Limoilou, Visual Arts at Université Laval, and Ceramics at the Maison des Métiers d’Art.

Through installation, performance art, documentation, and ceramics, her projects revolve around accumulated poetic gestures and shifting objects that, when brought into relation, test the limits of her body and her colonial surroundings.

Her investigations aim to offer tonalities—an array of affects and intensities—within a shared situation. As a critique of her own institutionalized ethos, she often chooses to create spaces where her proposals provoke reflection on the meaningful nature of being an artist in a given context.

All of this is woven around a reflection on disappearance, transition, overflow, and absence. These newly created spaces carry actions projected toward the future, focusing on possible reverberations, on potency, and above all, on necessary chaos.