We’re partnering with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art to profile artists in their 2025 TBA festival. Next up, Portland-based Dao Strom, who performs on Sept. 12 and 13 at 6 pm. Get your tickets to the rest of TBA’s amazing performances here.
Q: How would you describe your relationship to the West Coast?
A: I have always been someone from somewhere else. I think of the West Coast landscape, particularly the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas and the southern Oregon coast, as places that have received me at crucial junctures of my life.
Q: Name one thing you’ve read, looked at, watched, or listened to this month that left an impression on you:
A: I just saw Justine A. Chambers’ TBA performance and loved it so much. I was particularly struck by the elucidation of how much choice (how much voice!) can occur in between the steps, of a dance, as she was describing it, but it spoke to me also about working within forms and structures at large and toward inhabiting agency in so many ways.
Q: When did your artistic journey begin and what was the spark?
A: I’ve been writing and dwelling in imaginary worlds since I was a child. But I think I might not have been an artist at all if not for the condition of displacement in my life, as a Vietnamese person, and the sense of history and reorientation and debt that were such a crucial part of my family’s stories of how we came to be where and who we are.
Q: How has your work changed in the last five years?
A: Trying to transmute the darknesses into something at least endeavoring toward more beautiful, connective, reparative currents—exploring the potential alchemy within the acts of voicing and re-voicing…
Q: If you had to choose a new medium to work with, what would it be?
A: Space and light and absence of words.
Q: Shared workspace or solo studio?
A: So much of my practice is born out of remove and interiority and I can only really compose and write when I am alone, at least in the formative stages, so solo studio for the most part… though I like to be in shared space sometimes with others whom I feel comfortable enough around, and I do love the atmosphere of others at work, especially building and making things.
Q: Five artists, dead or alive, that you’d invite to dinner:
A: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Hilma Af Klint, Anne Carson, are the first who come to mind.
Q: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned recently, art-related or not?
I am continually surprised by the capacity of community to receive and hold space for our various voicings, especially as someone who has been so long accustomed to feeling an outsider and working along esoteric currents.