Live perforamnce at Area 405, in conjunction with Red Rae's "Paradise Portals" exhibition. Video by Re Orr.  2025

Taking inspiration from the action of doing laundry carried out by the artist's mother, the performance plays with stereotypes and actions associated with gendered roles. The performance uses water, laundry tub, clothes and on-site objects, reimagining  femininity and wetness as unruly matters. 

I am a tree in your life is series of one-on-one performances that explores the similarities between trees and humans. The performance was staged in the Ivy Bookstore garden, formerly belonging to Divine Life Church. I performed as a tree spirit who played hide-and-seek with the audience as a way to co-learn how to be a tree. By asking the audience to remember their memories of trees and inviting them in theatrical vignettes that explores the way trees grow, struggle, excrete and wilt, I am a tree in your life seeks to learn from trees’ way of transgressing preconceived boundaries between the self and the environment. 

Credit:

Conceived and Performed by Bao Nguyen
Dramaturgy by Susan Stroupe 
Photo documentation by Lianghong Ke
Costume design by Sarah Leiva 
Special thanks to Hannah Fenster, the Divine Life Church community, an anonymous Divine Life Church member and Swami Shankarananda 

The Center for Questioning and Questioning and Questioning? is series of 1-on-1, site-specific guided walks that has been staged in the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate, Norfolk, CT and the Jones Falls trail, Baltimore, MD. 2022-2023. 

Acting as the staff member of the Center, Bao invites one participant per walk to ask any question. As an exchange for their question, Bao walks with the participant to find answer.  Together, the audience and the performer make stop along the way, contemplating the location as an oracle for their question. Engaging the audience into intimate, conversation, improvised singing and movement, the walk becomes a journey of transformation. 

A question gives rise to a conflation of contemplation, delight, wonder, or perhaps, tears.

Are we sentient or sediment? In this exploration for a group of 5 to 6 visitors, you are invited to reflect on what we have been holding as humans and shift our logic slowly to consider what a rock has been holding. Through movement, singing and poetic conversation, we will move from thinking as human to thinking as rock.

This is a 40-minute interactive performance using the metaphor of rocks and the geological cycle to induce your realization of what you are holding onto in relation to collective emotions.

This performance happened on Friday, April 28 at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church at 7pm and 8:30pm. 

Credit: 

Conceived and Performed by Bao Nguyen
Co-produced by Joyce Liang and Cliff Banquet
Graphic design by Hayden Wright 
Photo documentation by Lianghong Ke
Video documentation by Rick Li and Jiangshan Li
Venue by St. Mark’s Lutheran Church with support from Pastor Emily, Vicar Liza and Tori Wick
Special thanks to all the test audience.

Documentary. Full HD, color, stereo sound. 

"Du Mục" is a Vietnamese song written by anti-war composer Trịnh Công Sơn that the artist listened to as a childhood lullaby. Reinterpreting the song’s haunting lyrics, the documentary grapples with the history of cultural censorship by both sides of the Vietnam war, war-inflicted trauma and inherited memory. The film combines site-specific re-performance of the song, family's oral history, re-telling of the artist's uncle experience as a Vietnam war veteran and archival materials. 

Performance video. Full HD video. Stereo sound. 2021. Strobe effect warning. 

 Lullaby Revisited No.2120 (who writes history?) interpolates “Gia Tài Của Mẹ”, an anti-war Vietnamese song written by composer Trịnh Công Sơn during the Vietnam war. The vocal improvisation tends to the national grief expressed in this childhood lullaby while questioning its underlined patriotic sentiment.

Performance lecture hosted on Zoom. Full duration: 47”08’.  Video documentation courtesy of Lauren Schooley. 

The Ocean Has the Final Say probes both the digital sites and physical material to question the historical construction of  border and sovereignty as relating to the modern nation-state and under the Mandala system in pre-modern Southeast Asia. Oscillating between chroma keying technology, live interaction with audiences and pre-recorded web-surfing, the performance speculates a new political system in which territory can be made both public and private, allowing for a more nuanced mode of owning and caring for the sea and land.