Since coming to the United States in 2011 (with a non-resident visa), Vince Phan has been making art to navigate his assigned identity as an “alien” and express his existence in a country that, while becoming home, remains foreign. Reflecting on the last ten years, all he knows is trying to survive in this country. Thus, his career objective is for him and his arts to LIVE so that he can inspire other aliens to live. As a reflection of that, he transforms his works of art into living things. They play a role in the ecosystem where they also have the privilege to live. Valien is a space created by aliens for aliens—a space in which they can imagine a future in which they can finally rest and then grow as individuals. To live sounds rather simple, but in America, it is a privilege, and all immigrants, refugees, DREAMers, and other assigned aliens must have access to this privilege.

Vince Phan is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, video, and performance. His time-based artworks focus on the ephemeral beauty in raw and organic materials such as flowers, soils, and compost. His works are systems oriented. They investigate and comprehend the chaos in nature and the nature in the chaos. Phan’s dual practice includes making time-based sculptures with adopted furniture as an attempt towards re-naturalization as well as trading artworks for human- occupied lands to create a new terra of possibility.

Underlying Phan’s practice of working with discarded objects and composting organic materials lies an effort to re-naturalize those objects in the natural ecology to play an active role in the environment. The process of re-naturalization in Phan’s practice questions how material associations get detached from their origins in the natural world, thus becoming artificial. The point is not to restore ‘naturalness’ but to find new roles in natural ecology.

A big part of Phan’s practice is planting and composting. Planting allows those who practice it to connect with the land by quite literally putting roots down into the soil. Composting and redistributing the compost products to his neighborhood gardens is his way to take care of his community. His short-term goal is to allow his presence and his roots to be embedded in the U.S. through the act of planting. His long-term goal is to use his practice as an example for other aliens to see the possibility to connect with the land on a deeper level so that they can start feeling comfortable to stay and grow.

When planting artworks in lands, Vince Phan trades earthly-alien creations for the soil of colonized territory. This accumulated soil then builds Valien, a new continent within colonized continents. As diverse bodies of soils are folded together, the combined chaotic components such as microorganisms and mineral compounds force the individual systems in the soils to collapse. The result is an emergent alien system, a terra in which individual differences build the Commons. An alien body generated from Earth itself proposes a possibility of change and transformation from current existing cultural systems. Valien’s body-the soil as material, subject, and object- questions the relationship of human ownership to lands and nationalities to Earth. Valien asks us to soften the Self; to see ourselves without the ego of ownership, to place ourselves within the ecology.