Nu’ó’c Nào?
Where are you from? Where is your water/country/homeland?
Fulbright Fellowship Research Project:
In Vietnamese, the word “nu’ó’c” means, water, country, nation, and homeland. To ask “nu’ó’c nào?” is to ask where is your water? Where is your country? Where is your home? This project investigates the relationship between Vietnamese communities and water. By exploring the subtleties of the word nu’ó’c in traditional arts, myths and legends, I plan to create a series of videos, installations and performances that explore notions water and home in the Vietnamese Diaspora. I intend to do this by learning traditional crafts and techniques such as water puppetry and boat weaving and by researching the origins and traditional method of making nu’ó’c ma’m (fish sauce), a staple in Vietnamese cuisine. I will study the impact of colonialism, militarism and tourism on these traditional crafts.
In Live by Water Die By Water, author Huynh Sanh Thong discusses the origins of the word “Nu’ó’c,” which has come to be one of the most pervasive denotations and connotations in the Vietnamese lexicon. She ruminates over the subtleties of the multifarious meanings. In the broadest sense, nu’ó’c is a step one takes in order to reach a goal. As a mixed race Vietnamese/American artist, I am constantly investigating my own relationship to Vietnam and I am forced to play the role of a cultural intermediary, treading water between both worlds. In this respect, I am interested in diving into nu’ó’c and experiencing Vietnam as an artist who is both American and Vietnamese, a product of the historical connection between these two countries.
The boat remains an important figure in the Vietnamese refugee narrative. The water represents a liminal space where identity is not fixed but instead becomes transnational – a space where race, gender, and sexuality is explored and transformed.
This project will be a new body of work including installation, video and durational performances created through documentation of my experiences. For me, durational performance embodies sentiment. The body takes responsibility for history, memories and feelings about a place and translates this into conceptual movement and figures the body in time, space and history. I will also incorporate traditional storytelling methods, such as water puppetry, to investigate the transnational experience of the Vietnamese community.