HOAN DOAN

Artist Biography

Hoan Doan is a multidisciplinary artist with more than fifteen years of practice across performance art, body movement, painting, installation, poetry, and vocal performance.

She graduated with a degree in Interior Design, but her passion for body movement and painting led her away from the field of design and into contemporary art practice. Her background in spatial thinking, form, and structure continues to shape the way she constructs visual imagery, movement, and installation in her work.

Her selected projects include:

• The Soundless Scream (2026)
• Xổm (2023)
• The Slavery (2023)
• The Basket (2022)
• Publication of the poetry collection I Heal Myself Through Words (2021)
• Four Seasons (2014)
• Metamorphosis (2013)
• Ghosts in Daylight (2013)
• Vietnam's Got Talent – Semi-finalist (2012)

Throughout her artistic journey, Hoan Doan has continuously expanded the expressive possibilities of the human body, treating it both as a creative medium and as a space where different artistic languages intersect and transform one another.

Her current research focuses on the simultaneous coexistence of multiple artistic languages within a single work, seeking to develop an artistic methodology centered on a single body as the generator and orchestrator of the entire creative process.

Artistic Background & Journey

Hoan Doan was born into a family with no artistic background. From childhood, she dreamed of becoming a dancer. At that time in Vietnam, however, dance was rarely regarded as a viable profession, and her family did not support her pursuing formal training in dance.

After graduating from high school, she worked for a year and saved money with the intention of applying to a professional dance school. When she eventually approached the school, she was refused admission because she was considered too old to begin formal dance training.

Rather than abandoning her artistic aspiration, she chose another path. She prepared for the entrance examination and was admitted to the Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Arts, where she studied Interior Design.

Her formal education therefore began with space, design and visual art, rather than dance or performance.

The artistic practices she developed later — performance, body movement, painting, poetry, writing and interdisciplinary art — did not emerge from formal academic training in those respective disciplines. Instead, they developed from an inner necessity: a persistent need to express herself, to understand herself, and to find different forms through which to question the human condition and the world around her.

For a long period of her life, Hoan experienced a profound sense of not knowing who she was, where she belonged, and of being isolated from the world around her. Meditation and her exploration of Buddhist philosophy became an important source of grounding during this period.

The values she encountered through Buddhist philosophy gradually became a guiding principle for both her life and artistic practice: the aspiration for freedom, the continuous development of the self through the opening of knowledge and awareness, and the expansion of the heart through sharing with others.

From this perspective, art is not simply a profession or a medium of expression for Hoan Doan. It is a process of self-education, self-discovery, questioning, transformation and connection with other human beings.

Her movement from visual art into performance, and from an exploration of beauty toward questions of humanity, freedom, injustice and evil, is therefore not an arbitrary shift. It is the result of a personal journey developed over many years — a journey in which life and art continuously influence and transform one another.

Artist Statement

I am a performance artist. Body movement is the primary language through which I construct conceptual imagery. I do not use the body to demonstrate technical skill or create choreography; instead, I treat the body as a living sculptural medium through which I reflect on history, power, and the human condition.

After more than fifteen years of working across performance art, painting, installation, poetry, and vocal performance, I have entered a new phase of artistic research: exploring how all of these artistic languages can coexist within a single work and be activated simultaneously by one living body.

In this practice, art is no longer a presentation of separate disciplines, but becomes a living organism—breathing, transforming, and evolving in the presence of the audience. The body is no longer simply the performer; it becomes the central system through which multiple artistic languages operate at the same moment.

I do not seek to demonstrate proficiency across multiple art forms. Instead, I explore the limits of human experience, where emotion, consciousness, knowledge, and the unconscious coexist within a single moment of presence.

I consider this an ongoing, long-term artistic inquiry into how one body can become a complete artistic universe.

Alongside my individual practice, I facilitate workshops that extend this inquiry into collective experience, inviting participants to explore the body as a living medium through movement, perception, and inner awareness.