hamsa fae

Instagram: @hamsalefae

Website: https://hamsafae.com/

Bio: hamsa fae (b. Los Angeles) is a Vietnamese-American artist who works across expanded performance, time based media, and socially engaged art. Her work has been presented bi-coastally at venues including Minnesota Street Project, Telematic Media Arts, and tiat. She has delivered talks at the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her writing has been published and featured in diaCritics, Vănguard, the Transgender Law Center, and the Yale School of the Environment. She is the Founder and Organizer of the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship in Southern California, supporting the development and visibility of queer AAPI artists.

Statement: 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 multimedia installations that function as contemporary altars and afterlives. Drawing on internet nostalgia and the post-Anthropocene, 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.