Artist-in-ResidenceCELINA HUYNH
CELINA HUYNH
Celina Huynh is a Vietnamese-Californian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans video, sound, direction, and performance. Celina navigates states of dissociation, liminality, and subconscious resonance, creating works that feel like transmissions from an in-between world. Her approach, which she describes as that of an “emotional anthropologist,” offers unflinching explorations of the human condition through deeply personal and culturally entangled expressions.
Celina joins Echo Correspondence as part of an ongoing inquiry into diasporic identity, sonic archiving, and the politics of emotional space. Her upcoming research and installation project, Searching for Severance, traces fragmented inheritances across Vietnam, reclaiming elements of her family’s cultural legacy through sound, memory, and performance.
Artist-in-residence
Celina Huynh
Searching for Severance is an introspective exploration of identity, disconnection, and the complexities of cultural legacy. Celina Huynh, a second-generation Vietnamese American, takes a bold departure from the common narrative of cultural reconnection. Rather than embarking on a hero's journey to rediscover her roots, Celina’s work is a deliberate attempt to sever ties with the past.
Through the lens of Paris by Night, a musical show produced by her family since 1983, she grapples with the weight of nostalgia and generational trauma that has shaped the Vietnamese diaspora.
“What once served as a source of communal healing now feels like a “collective trauma dump,” where 4,000 people gather to relive wartime nostalgia, often at the cost of facing the underlying despair.” - Celina Huynh on Searching for Severence
Through the lens of Paris by Night, an iconic musical show produced by her family since 1983, she grapples with the weight of nostalgia and generational trauma that has shaped the Vietnamese diaspora.
