NYMPHS is a solo exhibition by hamsa fae, reclaiming the nude for negotiating transgendered otherness. Presenting as a three channel moving-image installation, the artist stages eco-performances between Big Island, Mount Shasta, and the Rio Serpis, all known to be earth’s nexuses for spiritual metamorphosis.
Within Greco-Roman mythology and later 19th century painting, the nymph often appeared as an erotic objectification of the landscape itself. The artist queers the framework of the nymph by meditating the feminized form alongside vulnerable environmental sites. Through natural prosthetics, she destabilizes biological legibility as an act of returning the body to land.
hamsa fae (b. 1993, Los Angeles) is a Vietnamese American artist working across expanded performance and moving-image installation. As an internet-native rooted in a decade of land-based animist practice, she positions the body as a site of re-matriation. Through durational bodily transformation and self-documentation, she observes how gendered bodies are consumed and mediated within economies of feminized desire.
Emerging from the political and spiritual mundanity of trans womanhood, her work mobilizes nudity as an ancestral and digital technology of return. From natural landscapes in the Californias to livestreaming platforms, her site-responsive performances activate environments as co-performers. Audiences are invited to kneel, speak, recline, or gather in collective ritual acts that confront the historical erasure of third gender peoples while collapsing the distinction between witness, voyeur, and co-author.
Her multimedia installations extend these performances into speculative altars and ecological afterlives. Combining organic materials and assembled GIFs, she constructs immersive environments that destabilize binaries between nature and interface. Her work reveals how networked systems reshape intimacy and spectacle while eroding embodied relationships to earth and one another.
Her work has been presented across experimental and institutional spaces throughout San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego. She has delivered talks at the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her writing has been published and featured in diaCritics, Transgender Law Center, and the Yale School of the Environment. She is the Founder and Director of the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship in Southern California, supporting the development and visibility of queer AAPI artists