STATEMENT OF RESEARCH
Nancy Sayavong explores trauma, exploitation, and nervous system recovery through the visual language of fitness and wellness culture. Driven by her own experiences of harm, healing, and self-reclamation from predatory grooming and sexual exploitation, she examines how the body absorbs trauma and how individuals attempt to rebuild a sense of safety, strength, and identity in aftermath.
Using sculpture and photography, Sayavong introduces absence, interruption, and fragmentation into images and objects associated with health, beauty, and self-improvement. These disruptions challenge idealized narratives of wellness and relationships and reveal the gaps, vulnerabilities, and unfinished processes that often accompany recovery. Rather than presenting healing as a complete transformation, her work acknowledges its complexities and contradictions.
As a queer Laotian American artist from a working-class background, her work seeks to make visible experiences that are often hidden or difficult to discuss, inviting viewers to reflect on their own relationships to trauma, recovery, attractiveness, and belonging.
Biography: (b. Seattle, WA) Sayavong’s works have been included at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, SOMArts Cultural Center, Oakland Museum of California, Verge Center for the Arts among others. Residencies include The Headlands Center for the Arts in (Sausalito, CA), Ali Youssefi Project in (Sacramento, CA), Cow House Studios in (Wexford, Ireland), and Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation in (Berkeley, CA). Sayavong received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014.
*Nancy Sayavong lives and works in San Francisco, California. She is currently developing a nonprofit organization called iNcluart, envisioned as a vibrant community incubator for contemporary arts and charity to the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Located in the heart of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District, iNcluart’s mission is to provide a creative space where artists can refine their skills, connect with the public, and celebrate the powerful intersection of trades, craftsmanship, and artistic expression.