I grew up with a shrine in my family home—a statue of Buddha on a modest shelf framed in Christmas lights. This co-mingling and connection of finite and infinite, material and spiritual, was a visible part of daily routine. I watched my mother burn incense, arrange food offerings, and meditate. My own practice draws upon devotional acts of ritual and repetition to reconcile the tension between perceiving the material world as a subject and embodying it as a connected thing among other things in a complex system of moving parts and fluctuating boundaries.

Eastern spiritual practice intersects Western phenomenology. Spirituality for me is embodied using elements of play, structure, repetition, and accumulation to lose perceived boundaries of self to get to a place of connectedness with all matter.

I choreograph thought experiments, play apparatuses, obstacle courses, vision quests, rituals for mourning, remembering, and transformation, and create systems connecting objects, gestures, and bodies, to ask philosophical questions around knowledge and existence and to question dominant, Western belief systems that draw binaries such as between subjects and objects. In recent work, I consider situations for enabling agency in a phase of capitalism characterized by anxiety.

I am drawn to the in-between, the contradiction, the fuzzy middle, the shifting boundary that distinguishes a thing from another thing, where frameworks such as language begin to break down, opening up to possibility. My work considers particular sites, objects, and texts as starting points for response. The magic circle of a game or a set of instructions may become a site for transformation and resistance.

Dao Nguyen is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist. Their name is a homophone for the Vietnamese word for knife. They are the compact, red Leatherman multi-tool your aunt gave you for Christmas ten years ago. On sale at Marshall’s. Versatility and hidden strength in a small package at a discount. Stealthy enough to pass through security checkpoints on three continents on four separate occasions. They can cut, screw, file, saw, and open your beer. Bonus applications include carving miniature graphite figurines, picking locks, and sculpting tofu.

They have exhibited and performed in backyards, bathrooms, stairwells, highways, white cubes, and black box spaces, including Sector 2337, Defibrillator, the MCA, Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Brea Art Gallery, The Foundry Arts Centre, and Irvine Fine Arts Center. They received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Artist-in-Residence at ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale, Elsewhere: A Living Museum, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

daonguyen.com, @bluepupae