Into Ethereality: Performance as Remembrance, Southern California-Based Artist Hamsa Fae

Hamsa Fae (b. Los Angeles) is a trans Vietnamese-French performance artist and poet living and working in Southern California. Her practice combines live performance with movement, sound, and everyday objects to remember the in-between and beyond. Her recent works have been exhibited at the Mingei International Museum, Bread & Salt, Athenaeum Art Center, and Fronte San Ysidro. Her solo exhibition, Trans Aphrodisia, was in 2024 at the Brown Building. She is the recent winner of the Prebys Healing Through the Arts Grant, where she will curate the first AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship in San Diego. Her performances debut to New York audiences in March 2025 with the AHL Foundation. 

Thank you for joining us today, Hamsa. Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the underground rave scene here. Dance floors are ceremony spaces for me to breathe in the possibilities of an ecstatic body. I remember the comfort of Chinatown noodles and baos, recovering from nights that felt like an infinite movement. My hometown continues to parent me. I’ve spent the last ten years researching shamanism, observing the leylines of Mount Shasta, Big Island, New York, San Diego, Paris, and Saigon as portals for dreaming. I am currently enjoying the mysteries of the mundane while creating pathways for human/non-human poetics to come through.

What experience has been most important in developing the direction of your work?

I wrote a book, Blood Frequency (2022), a full-length collection of poems that re-narrate the ancestral secrets and erotic desires for my trans becoming. These poems act as a subconscious map for inspiring my live performances by using memory as a medium for unearthing diasporic conversations and the invisible. My process enjoys using nostalgia as a guide for channeling the potential elements of my work. Living in physical transition/otherness inspires me to create more performances that decolonize trans identity and the male gaze. 

Your performances engage audiences through themes of identity, queerness, and ecology. Can you elaborate on how your Vietnamese-French heritage and queer identity inform your art practice, and how you navigate these intersections to convey complex narratives within your performances?

I see the audience as sitting at a dinner table. A village council around the fire. It is this ultimate co-regulatory space for processing the layers of history that have created our social contracts of today. I see the performance, the entirety of it, as a ritual. They act as these shells to take home and stare at every morning. I dedicate my work to the (tra)ancestors. Every performance acts as an intentional ode to the bones of the past and the future freedom of being in a body. The shadows of immigration and American assimilation led me to this process of re-indigenizing, a practice of returning to land/plant-based wisdom as if my grandmothers can dance through me. The visceral use of my voice in performance, inspired by biomimicry, helps me express my native tongues and the hidden.

What does it mean to you to have a “community”? Does community, art-related or otherwise, influence your work?

Community is everything to me. Every relationship dynamic merges into one while in it. I can be the best friend, the mother, the wandering, and also be something in progress at the same time. The community feels like a space to evolve without urgency. Pour some orange juice. Smell a jasmine flower. Brush their hair. It’s a re-village and offers me so much joy (especially in between projects). My community is always in the audience. I feel their skin and hands of support, which helps my performances move uninhibitedly. Every debut of a new work is a birthday party – one for all of us. 

How has your artistic journey evolved over the years, and what do you see as the next phase in your creative exploration?

The evolution of my work is the act of birthing more (and more). It’s like I’ve been impregnated each year of my life, but didn’t push anything through the art world canal till 2023. The next phase is the continuation of the spiral. I believe in synchronicity to guide my energy. I am really curious about integrating more technology into my works – to experiment with the wavelengths of both the organic and the digitized. 

Do you have any advice that you would offer to others?

Feel the wind circling in your pores. Suck on every bone in your soups. If your hand is close to someone else’s, hold it. There are so many miracles every day. 

text & photo courtesy of Hamsa Fae

• Website: http://www.heartofhamsa.com/
• Instagram: @hamsalefae