Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs Performance/Installation @ Time-Based Art Festival 2025 (PICA)
Dao Strom appearing at the Time-Based Art Festival 2025 at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) with two nights of performance September 12-13, and an installation open until October 4th.
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Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs is a hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera that tend to “yellow subjectivities” and enact small spaces of connectivity across boundaries of diaspora and identity.
For TBA:25, multidisciplinary artist Dao Strom presents an installation of multimodal poetry works in PICA’s Annex, activated by two performances featuring a unique blend of poetry and music in collaboration with She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists—of which Dao is a founding member—and a special set of “diaspora songs” with accompaniment by Fear No Music.
Info + Tickets: https://pica.org/events/tenderrevolutions
These performances celebrate the release of Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs as a set of four chapbooks, Yellow Songs 1-4, and an LP, Tender Revolutions. The project is a joint release of The 3rd Thing Press, Antiquated Future Records, and Beacon Sound. Books and vinyl albums will be available at TBA:25. Preorder Links:
https://the3rdthing.press/product/tender-revolutions-yellow-songs
https://antiquatedfuture.bandcamp.com/album/tender-revolutions
https://beaconsound.bandcamp.com/album/tender-revolutions
Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs begins with an act of voicing in response to troubling representations of Asian women in popular media in the West. The theme of yellowness—of the Asian body as perceived; of the Asian feminine body as reflection/catalyst/consort—is introduced here. A “re-voicing” of the problematic 1983 hit song “China Girl” by David Bowie invites a collective response to the thematics of voice and silence via the “multi-voice” poetry of She Who Has No Master(s). Through these acts of multimodal poetry, She Who Has No Master(s) engages in reclaiming, reinhabiting, and reimagining/re-imaging associations of the color yellow. Other visual and sonic poetry works further contemplate themes of diaspora, passage, and the shifting borderlines and mutabilities of a hybrid self.
As a songwriter, Strom has been exploring “diaspora songs” since the early 2000s, when she first began experimenting with infusing into the context of “Americana” and folk/roots music her own diasporic Vietnamese experiences of displacement, postwar memories, and “folk” stories. Strom will perform a special set of these “diaspora songs,” combining atmospheric folk elements with a chamber music arrangement by Kenji Bunch of Fear No Music.
Performer Bios:
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, and visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song, and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Although separate, these elements are unified by a shared (under)current that transposes itself through or despite its conduits, and endeavors toward “re-membering” and attempting to synchronize the divided ‘languages’ within the self and concerning the self as placed in the world.
Strom is the author/composer of several hybrid works, including the music/poetry project TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025), and INSTRUMENT (2020), which won the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE. She co-curated and co-edited the hybrid literary anthology and exhibition, A Mouth Holds Many Things (2024), and released an album of ambient-folk songs, Redux (2022). She is also the author of a bilingual poetry-art collection, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People with song cycle East/West; and two books of fiction. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, Ford Foundation, Precipice Fund, NEA, and others. She is the co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists making polyvocal poetry-art works; and de-canon, a literary social art project centering BIPOC writers. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of northern California and now lives in Portland, OR.
She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a “multi-voice” collaborative art and writing process, they endeavor to bring into concert the voices of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Joining Dao will be two poets from SWHNM, Hoa Nguyen and Barbara Tran.
Hoa Nguyen is a poet and educator teaching writing and poetics at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her books include Red Juice, the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, a finalist for the National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award. She’s the 2024 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, an Aquarius, and a Fire Horse.
Barbara Tran’s poetry collection Precedented Parroting was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and a CBC selection for Best Books of 2024. Barbara authored the narration of Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a short, virtual reality film, nominated for Best VR Story at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Her writing has been recognized by the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She shares her home in Tkaronto with her partner and their two rescue dogs.
The Fear No Music Ensemble is a collective of professional musicians dedicated to performing the chamber music of our time. With a passion for innovation and a commitment to fostering a love for live ensemble music, Fear No Music pushes the boundaries of what classical music can be. Kenji Bunch is the artistic director of Fear No Music.
Image from YELLOW ECHOES by She Who Has No Master(s)
