Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen

Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen runs free through the field of action art in all its forms. Her interventions respond to specific places, moments, and audiences: casting her shadow on a wall and scratching it with a fingernail, lying down in a river and lighting firecrackers. She stages these gestures and non-gestures to test the limits of her body, of art, and of institutions, all while challenging their presence in the public space. In situ and in socius, emerging from contexts rooted in the present, her actions are nevertheless oriented toward possible futures.

Reflecting disappearance, ghostly presences, and transitory moments, Nguyen reaches out to what resists. In Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, she devoted her studio time to shaping ceramic objects invested with performative potential for use in an action melding the visible and the invisible. In the footsteps of the “hungry ghost,” a mythical creature that appears in Buddhist reincarnation cycles and symbolizes the impossibility of attaining satiety, a performance was sketched out. The fragile materiality of the objects Nguyen made echoes their fate, underlining both the risk inherent to handling matter and that in which she places herself. In parallel, she launched a call to the nearby art community to come together to form an “invisible heap” on the riverbank. She also invited those with no experience in performance art to participate, expressing the inclusive spirit behind the “heaps” assembled beyond the borders of art disciplines and arising all over the world. The collective performative moment articulated a shared rootlessness, furtive actions conducted in full daylight, and the linking of unsuspected connections.

The simultaneous exploration of these two avenues is recorded in a continual performance for which Nguyen places her body in tension between art and politics. Her interventions, taking place in blurry zones between reality and performance, challenge social, cultural, and aesthetic norms and open the path to conflict and chaos – to a rupture with conventional ways of being and acting in the public space.