An Interview of Diane Severin Nguyen
interview by Whitney Mallett
photography by Zoe Chait
New Yorkβbased, California-born Diane Severin Nguyen works across photography, video, and installation, investigating how media and imagery shape identity, history, and power. In a conversation with Whitney Mallett, Nguyen discusses her first live performance, which turns to antiβVietnam War protest music, reimagined as a televised concert that blurs the lines between performance and broadcast. She reinterprets classic folk and protest songs, tracing how they have been remembered, transformed, and mythologized, while exploring how nostalgia for political struggle shapes contemporary notions of resistance and freedom. This commissioned project unfolds across a new music album, a live band performing as a conceptual art project, and a broadcast performance, creating an immersive exploration of sound, memory, and cultural resonance. It is co-commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
WHITNEY MALLETT: How are you feeling after your first rehearsal last night?
DIANE SEVERIN NGUYEN: Itβs really exciting to actually have the performers to work with. We were just figuring out what everyoneβs strengths are and what kinds of characters we could pull out of them. I had everyone pretend they were on a drugβketamine, LSD, shroomsβand it turned out to be surprisingly effective. It was the perfect layer to free them up. And, interestingly, when you act βpsychedelic,β you inevitably channel the β60s and β70s. Thereβs something about that era that just seeps in.
MALLETT: So, is it fair to say that, in assessing everyone like this, youβre drawing inspiration from your performers and building in a collaborative element?
NGUYEN: Yes, of course. I feel like everyone has at least two opposite ends within them, and their personality ends up being some strange averageβor even a conflictβbetween those extremes. So, what Iβm doing is making the process more participatory: having the performers explore those opposite sides of themselves. Once we assess everyone, weβll really know what the best songs are and what narrative makes the most sense. It makes the idea of a musical a lot more fluid, which is fun.
MALLETT: The concept is that itβs a band, right?
NGUYEN: Yes, itβs an eleven-person band, but it keeps mutating. There will probably be smaller vignettes too: three people at once, maybe a medley with two or three together. And at the end, everyone will perform as a group. But honestly, itβs almost too much with everyone performing at once; there are just so many different threads and registers I want to hit within the same performance. For me, the idea of opposites and friction within a person is really important. I want every performer to embody multiple selves, not just one role.
MALLETT: You mentioned the psychedelia of the β60s and β70sβis there an anti-Vietnam War reference in it?
NGUYEN: Totally. Thatβs the whole thread of it. Music in that era was almost dangerous. Weβve been going through a lot of songs from that time. The lyrics can be shockingly explicit about war and questioning authority. Itβs not just about reenacting protest music from that era, but about asking whether that messaging collides with todayβs music at all. Because people donβt really use music as a medium for mass, populist messaging in the same way anymore. Weβre in a very surreal space with music right now. Iβm drawn to that eraβnot just musically, but also through films, books, and especially the French New Wave. French New Wave was formally innovative, but it was also always linked to politics, with the Vietnam War as a constant peripheral subject. Itβs fascinating how distant suffering could inspire so much Western creative production. You see people discovering themselves in a kind of liberal humanist wayβvalues like love, freedom, anti-establishmentβand yet those values often depended on conflict abroad to find that sense of transcendence. Iβm drawn to how conflict sparks soul-searching, then gets commodifiedβas it did in the β60s and β70s.
MALLETT : Thereβs an almost constant recycling of the so-called βauthenticityβ of that period. Iβm thinking about how much I loved Almost Famous (2000) when I was younger. And then there was that Bob Dylan movie that just came out.
NGUYEN: I also saw that the Whitney Museum is putting on a group show called Sixties Surreal this fall. I feel like those two words, βauthenticityβ and βfreedom,β are so important to the performance. For the past five years or so, Iβve been really interested in how the acoustic has come back, how Gen Z bands are leaning into it, and the authenticity we project onto the acoustic. And how that connects to the authenticity of protests today, itβs still very nostalgic of the β60s and β70s. The protests we romanticize most are the protests against the Vietnam War, so in creating the graphic design, that imagery is always there.
MALLETT: When I was younger, I just thought of it as β70s music. It took me getting older to realize it was actually part of a folk revival itself. But also, speaking more broadly about your practiceβI loved In Her Time (Irisβs Version). Maybe you could talk about your larger study of feeling. For me, it makes sense that music and angst go togetherβthat whole tradition is one way to access it. But I know itβs something youβre interested in beyond music.
NGUYEN: I donβt always want to reduce my practice to the era of the Vietnam War, but thinking through that period has been so productive for me. On a deeper level, it probably connects to my own search for identity. The Vietnamese body, historically, is imagined as burning, mutilated, and always marked by violence. The Western liberal gaze turns it into an object of pity: I feel bad for you, Iβm sorry for you. Iβm drawn to those contradictionsβthe most toxic and the most affirmative sides of sentimentalityβand how complex that emotion is. Even as a teenager, I often identified more with things happening elsewhere, or in another time, than with my own present. Thereβs something about how we need those other images, other histories, to latch onto in order to see ourselves. So much of my practice is about unpacking that gazeβnot to arrive at a neat thesis, but to trouble it. In In Her Time (Irisβs Version), for instance, the actress is reenacting a rape scene from a film about the mass rapes of Chinese women. She finds a kind of pleasure in that performance, and with it, a strange authenticity through a predetermined script, and through an event she never experienced. That paradox fascinates me. In the end, Iβm trying to think through emotions in a way that acknowledges their complications. Like in Adam Curtisβs work, itβs about tracking how emotions develop over time, and how they shape where we locate both the self and collectivity.
MALLETT: I feel like youβre also talking about consumptionβboth the cultural consumption of this subject position and how that becomes a way to access emotion. We consume products, media, images, and through that, we construct identity. Going back to the Vietnam War era is interesting, a moment when American society was also negotiating the import of Asian culture: kawaii aesthetics, teen music fandom, and identity as something to be consumed. There are so many layers in how these forms of cultural and emotional consumption overlap.
NGUYEN: Itβs weird how teenagers are so malleable, but at the same time have so much conviction. In this performance, itβs less directly about βyoung girl energy,β but it does circle around what now feels slightly cringe. Iβm adapting a lot of languageβlifting stage banter, gestures, all those little aspects of a concert that can be played with. So much of it comes back to freedomβnot as a movement, but as a texture, as something aesthetic. You really feel it in that era, even in fashion details or interiors from the β60s and β70sβshag carpeting, for example. What did those textures actually mean when, at the same time, the television was constantly broadcasting the war? The home became this surreal, almost psychedelic space.
MALLETT: This is probably your biggest performance so far. Youβre staging a similar kind of emotional experience as a film, but the process of putting it together is very different. In film, you can rearrange the order of things. So, Iβm curious how this compares to your filmmaking process.
NGUYEN: I guess Iβm figuring that out too, because it feels strange not to have the mediation of the cameraβsince Iβm so interested in mediation. I keep thinking about how to build the performance with the awareness that performance itself is already a form of mediation, and what we expect from it. For me, itβs always about playing with that. In my films, the last thing I want is for someone to feel they can completely access somethingβbecause to me, thatβs not possible. You can never fully access a person. So, itβs always about thinking through layers of perception. Approaching that in the context of a concert or performance has been really fun. In a way, itβs almost like my photography. There will probably be parts of the concert where there are no people at all, just lights and kinetic effects. Iβm planning to use wind, fake snow, and wetness, for example. I think anything referencing Vietnam will mostly come through this threat of natureβthrough instabilityβrather than anything explicit. So, within that space of improvisation, movement, and light, I want to see how all these elements collide and create chemistry. There has to be instability. And because Iβm using a concert as the frame, thereβs so much to work with. Iβm not really thinking in terms of performance artβIβm thinking in terms of a televised concert.
MALLETT: Thereβs also the mediation of everyone holding their iPhone.
NGUYEN: Yeah, exactly. Itβs going to be at BRIC, which is a broadcasting studio. The cameras will actually be on the audience, and I think theyβll have a powerful presence. I like that because it connects back to that era of television broadcasting, when concerts like this were happening all the time.
MALLETT: It makes me think of American Bandstand. When I was a kid in the β90s, we had the Canadian version of MTV, called MuchMusic. I loved putting it on and dancing alongβbasically just dancing while watching people dance in a studio. I guess it was a kind of low-cost way to engage with youth culture and music.
NGUYEN: Thereβs definitely an equivalent to that. The spaces, the sets, the whole atmosphere of live performance feels really familiar to me. They still happen a lot in Asia and other cultures, where the variety show format is such a big thingβthe competitions, the constant audience engagement, even the laugh track.
MALLETT: There was a British one tooβTop of the Pops. I didnβt watch it contemporaneously, but years later, I would find it on YouTube. A lot of bands like Blur and Oasis performed on it. It was televised live, which feels connected to the semiotics youβre working with in this concert. When YouTube first came around, I remember watching a lot of those recordings. I guess SNL still carries a version of that tradition.
NGUYEN: Yeah, I went through all the SNL performances, Tiny Desk, and Jools Holland. Thereβs an intimacy thatβs not really there.
MALLETT: You get a sense of how good someone is as a live performer, even if youβre not physically there. In the β80s and β90s, so much of connecting with an audience happened through televised broadcasts, before the music video became dominant. You wouldnβt know if someone was a strong live performer until you saw them on SNL or the Grammys. And I think thatβs the real testament of a pop starβwhether they can carry that kind of live performance.
NGUYEN: Itβs funny because in K-pop, for instance, there are all these live stage performances and variety show appearances, but what theyβre really mastering is performing to the cameras. Theyβre on seven different cameras at once, which becomes a whole different way to engage the audience. I feel bad for anyone actually sitting in the roomβtheyβre not being sung to; all the performers are focused on the cameras. You see the same thing in fashion now, with any setup that uses that kind of rig.
MALLETT: It does take a specific talent to perform for a live audience. Bruno Mars is good at that.
NGUYEN: (laughs) Yes. I feel like I consume a lot of music where the performers are really skilled at working the camera. I also like how Brechtian it isβthis awareness of the apparatus, amping up a feeling of intimacy that they canβt actually have with the live audience because the space is so big. Instead, they project it onto the camera, onto an audience that isnβt physically there. I did something similar when making In Her Time [(Irisβs Version)]. I told the actress, βPretend youβre being interviewed.β I didnβt actually conduct the interview, but the camera acted as a relay to something else entirely. Iβd like to bring that out in this live performance. It surfaces a discomfort, a kind of cringe, but itβs fascinating: you sense something emergingβmaybe not narcissism, but a quality that goes beyond the present moment.
MALLETT: You mentioned that you watch a lot of K-pop. Do you think that dance routines will possibly play a role in the performance?
NGUYEN: I wish it could. Of course, I want a dance routine. Iβm just trying to work backwards to see where that could make sense. That kind of dancing in unison is not very Western. It is much more Eastern, especially in that era. What you have in the West is people stomping around the stage and kicking things. Thatβs more the movement that Iβm looking for. What are the anti-establishment movements?
MALLETT: That makes me think about this performance art piece I was in for my friendβs undergrad years ago, where we redid Woodstock β99. We were just breaking stuff. Youβre thinking about the original Woodstock as a reference for this, but I just thought of Woodstock β99 as an example of a total failure of revival. As a child of the β90s, it felt like history was over.
NGUYEN: Yeah, this is totally in that vein. Itβs really funny to think about how everything has been a revival of something else. But even in the β60s and β70s, it was already being co-opted in some way. It was also highly effective for advertising during the Mad Men era.
MALLETT: Growing up in the era that we didβwe are around the same ageβwe had to learn that that era also wasnβt authentic, but in the β90s, we were led to believe that it was.
NGUYEN: I used to listen to folk music in high school, which wasnβt in my immediate cultural context, so why was it so effectively romantic? It felt very real.
MALLETT: Would you be downloading it on Napster?
NGUYEN: Totally. Limewire. Napster. I was so good at stealing everything.
MALLETT: How did you cast the ensemble? Did you send out a casting call? Or was it amongst friends of friends?
NGUYEN: Performa posted on Backstage, and I got a lot of submissions. I narrowed it to twenty, then live-auditioned half. Everyone sang βLet It BeββI chose it for its simplicity, but I realized how powerful it is. The composition, the texture, the melodyβit feels collective, uplifting. Hearing people sing it together was unexpectedly moving.
MALLETT: People say the Beatles are overrated, but it sounds like you arenβt in that camp.
NGUYEN: Iβm trying to be objective about it and not think too much about what I love and what I donβt, because it makes it way more fun to go into things that I used to find a bit cringe, over-affected, or not in my taste. Thatβs the most fun part of the performance: putting everything together. Because half of it is funny, then at a certain point, it becomes just real. Itβs about reaching the end and not being able to tell. We can only really test it out if we can see how it affects people.
MALLETT: It is interesting to think specifically about the Performa audience and that demographic. Like Joni Mitchell, she could end up coming to this, which is interesting to think about.
NGUYEN: At the preview, the room was mostly older patrons with a few younger friends. We played Donovanβs βUniversal Soldierβ as pop punk and Billie Eilishβs βOcean Eyesβ as Bob Dylan. Half the room recognized one, half the other. When the helicopter soundscame in, the older crowd associated them with Vietnam. I liked how those generational differences created multiple entry points for the audience.
MALLETT: Would you say thatβs one of your goalsβthat youβre thinking about the intensity of an emotional experience?
NGUYEN: I just want people to notice certain things more. Sometimes that can feel really good, but it can also make you feel hypocritical or feel some contradiction. Itβs a really powerful feeling to confront the contradiction. I even make work from feelings of contradiction. I feel like everything is a weird unconscious commentary on the art world, on being an artist, what people expect from you, and how you play with that. And itβs about that whole system that produces meaning and emotion. There is an equivalent to whatever Bob Dylanβs space is in art, or in everything, where something becomes assigned an authentic form of suffering, protest, or resistance. We should think through where we place the power of intellectual authority.