out of sight: Cầu thang, Chuồng đất & Khoảnh khắc từ trường bình thường (Out of Sight: Staircase, Hog Pen & Moments of an Ordinary Magnetic Field)
Performance
Event Details
Details
Performance at an Evening of Performance Art/e Acción, No Nation Art Gallery and Tangential Unspace Lab, Shikaakwa-Ojibwe-Odawa-Pottawatomi-Miami-Meskwaki, territorio Abya Yala, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 3 September 2023 Watch documentation
Xông hơi bằng nồi lá (herbal pot steaming), in Vietnamese households, is how a body is tended at a threshold: after illness while shaking of a cold, or after childbirth. A pot of leaves is boiled, a blanket is placed over the steaming pot, and a body is placed inside to be cared for by the sweat. This small ritual of care is largely held and passed on by women, in kitchens.
In Out of Sight, Thuy-Tien Vo carried this domestic ritual to an underground radical art space in Chicago that hosts artists and collectives working on race, gender, identity and liberation. The work was staged soon after the global pandemic ended, when physical proximity was still considered to be avoided (especially, between strangers). Thuy-Tien turned a herbal steaming pot into an invitation to closeness. Heat from the pot and the smell of the herbs served as a medium for re-attuning to one another. Audience members were asked to shed some of their clothing and crawl beneath the cloth draped over the steaming pot. The performance happened in full view, yet it stayed concealed to those who only watched. Those who chose to enter the proximity knew what took place inside. This unsettles the usual contract of performance, in which the audience watches and the performer is watched. Spectatorship gives way to shared heat, scent, breath, and the work’s meaning is held in the bodies of participants beneath the cloth.
The pot held what a foreign city could offer: clove basil, mint, ginger, dried pomelo peel, lemongrass and mugwort, while perilla, lime leaves and dried bamboo leaves were missing. These absences raise questions about how plant-based care practices adapt when their ecologies shift, and what resilience looks like when it is improvised from what is at hand.
Event Participants
Thuy-Tien Vo
Ho Chi Minh city
Thuy-Tien Vo is an artist-curator, practice-led researcher, and Associate Lecturer in the School of Communication & Design, RMIT Vietnam. Her practice explores how ritual, rehearsal and everyday forms are collectively performed, inherited and remade. She co-founded Ba Rọi Collective and [[Rehearsal]], whose devised performances and micro-cinemas unfold in homes, makeshift venues and art spaces across Vietnam, China, Thailand and the United States. Her inter-Asian collaborations extend to Indonesia and Japan. Most recently, she curated Circular Design Week 2026 with partners in the Mekong Delta (Cần Thơ and Trà Vinh): Abavina, a cooperative for circular, low-emission farming; Sokfarm, an organic coconut-nectar producer sustaining a Khmer craft of tending coconut blossoms; and Ánh Dương Center, which supports marginalised rural communities. DESIAP was research partner.