MASS MoCA Residency for She Who Has No Masters

In April 2024, Mass MoCA’s Assests for Artists hosted the She Who Has No Masters collective for a creative residency. Here’s a glimpse at their collective creation towards a hybrid literary project and staged photo performances exploring embodiments of harmony, dissonance, resonance, light, shadow, and yellow.

This project was inspired by a creative prompt based on an essay titled Voiced / Voiceless and musical “re-voicing” by collective member Dao Strom in which she investigates (and musically re-inhabits) the condition of the Asian female figure being “voiced” and “voiceless”. Over the course of several months, She Who Has No Master(s) directed attention toward troubling representation of Asian female figures in popular culture, including a problematic hit song from the 1980s, to create a recombinant series of texts and images designed to reimagine, wrest, and resituate such narratives. Members contributing to this series include Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Barbara Tran, Dao Strom, Hoa Nguyen, Jessica Q. Stark, Lily Hoang, Phuong T. Vuong, Sophia Terazawa, Vi Khi Nao, and Yen Ha. 

This movement from a single to collective voicing/re-voicing in response to these conditions forms an important basis for this project. An act of communion through transmission, a reclamation and resistance through collective visibility, it brings together our voices to create a new chorus and a new music.

Collective members Vi Khi Nao, Hoa Nguyen, Lily Hoang, Barbara Tran, and Yen Ha in their studio at MASS MoCa. Portrait by Luiza Folegatti.

Portrait of Hoa in her studio by Luiza Folegatti.

Hoa Nguyen would like to express her deepest gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support, which made it possible for her to participate in the residency at MASS MoCa.