I am a British-born Vietnamese interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and performance. My practice investigates how we inhabit and internalise space, treating the body as both subject and material. I approach materials and objects not as passive props, but as active agents in the construction of identity, memory, and encounter. This fundamental rethinking of the material world is deeply informed by the Mono-ha movement, which taught me to see materials like stone, wood, and steel not as raw substances to be shaped, but as entities with their own weight, presence, and agency. Mono-ha’s emphasis on the relationality between objects—and between objects and space—provides a crucial foundation for my work, highlighting how meaning emerges from encounter and interdependence rather than from artistic intervention. This philosophy directly informed my understanding of performance as a relational ecology.

I view my artistic practice as a series of poetic iterations of archetypes—recurring patterns in human behaviour and in the objects shaped by cultural contexts. By placing myself in specific situations, I rework these archetypes toward alternative outcomes. Each iteration becomes a form of refinement: it reveals not only what an archetype is expected to mean or do, but also the wider range of unintended roles that bodies, materials, and objects can perform.

My work is shaped by a researched dialogue between Western performance art and the Chinese concept ‘behaviour art’ (xíngwéi yìshù). From Western training I inherited a critical framework: awareness of the performer-audience dynamic, the institution, and embodied ideas. From my Vietnamese heritage and years in Asia, I drew toward behaviour art’s direct action, which prioritises social intervention, where the body becomes a site of resistant subjectivity, offering agency to intervene in social systems. This dual perspective is embodied in my material and spatial training. My degree in Fine Art Sculpture (University of Southampton - Winchester School of Art, UK) instilled a deep material thinking. My previous experience teaching in the Department of Architecture at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, exposed me to spatial systems and vernacular design. My Master's in Performing Public Space (Fontys Academy of the Arts, Netherlands) taught me to challenge the body under real social and legal conditions.

Central to this research is a deep interest in material culture: how objects accrue meaning, carrying ritual, trade, migration, and power. I use James J. Gibson’s design theory of affordances to frame this conceptually. Affordances are the action possibilities an environment offers a body, and they are important to my practice because they reveal how material and spatial conditions actively invite, permit, or refuse movement, speech, and belonging—making identity something enacted through negotiated possibility rather than fixed essence. As a dual-heritage artist, I feel this acutely: spaces do not merely contain the body but condition what it can become. My work stages these affordances, testing what a body can do, what culture allows, and how identity is enacted when environments change. I treat performance not as a scripted event, but as a relational ecology of possible actions. Following Mono-ha’s lead, I am interested in the encounter as a site of potential, where the relationship between the body, the material, and the space is not fixed but continuously negotiated. Ultimately, my practice stages encounters that probe the boundaries of space, identity, and belonging, revealing the body as a site where culture is both internalised and contested. 

‘Wearing Several Hats’
Non La - Leaf Hat (2015 | 2025) Private Collection

Exhibited at ‘Womb of Fire ‘ at Vin Art Gallery & Mo art Space
Ho Chi Minh City & Hanoi. Vietnam