Meet rising art star Riven Ratanavanh

Photo courtesy of Riven Ratanavanh

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Riven Ratanavanh‘s artistic journey began not in the bustling city of Bangkok where they grew up, but in New York City, where they arrived at eighteen. Being transmasculine and gender-nonconforming, Ratanavanh has always felt the complexities of identity and visibility. Their East/Southeast Asian background adds another layer to their identity, and is also how they learned to move with agility between cultures and in the diversity within the diaspora. Living in America gave Ratanavanh a whole new perspective on themself and their art. They suddenly saw themself as part of a vast, multicultural, queer and trans diaspora. 

Performance art? It was never part of Ratanavanh’s plan. Yet, here they are, an artist who thrives in this medium, where they got their start. “As an artist, I’ve worked mainly in performance-based formats, so it might come as a surprise to some, now that many people know me for this kind of work, that I once thought dancing, moving, performance-based work would be the last thing I’d do in this lifetime,” Ratanavanh says. Movement became their sanctuary, a way to craft their body and create a safe space within themself that created the groundwork for their artistic practice.

It has been a busy year for Ratanavanh, who has had recent performances at the historic Movement Research series at the Judson Church, and upcoming performances at major venues like the Park Avenue Armory.

Beyond performance, their artwork also expands into other, multidisciplinary mediums, including film, poetry, and conceptual works. New York’s energy is infectious. “The spirit [of New York] is very experimental and avant-garde,” Ratanavanh says. “Performance overlaps and intertwines with other mediums like poetry, music, and visual art; the edges and constraints of artistic mediums are always being blurred and pushed into new territory — and I’m really grateful for having access to that, and I’m inspired by my friends and collaborators doing work in and across all of these mediums.”

Ratanavanh has shared his poetry at iconic venues like the New York Poetry Project for their legendary 50th Annual New Years’ Day Marathon. Most recently, he was invited to show his conceptual work Testosterone on Canvas at the storied Tutu Gallery in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy. In some performances, he finds these mediums also coming back together to intertwine — in his most recent piece presented at historic Movement Research series at the Judson Church, he delivers a poetry reading within a performance.

In other cases, his performances become films, and these films in turn inspire and generate future performances. Such was the case with his film Inner Dawn, which was initially a performance for the stage that Ratanavanh turned into a film. Inner Dawn has since graced international screens including the Institute of Contemporary Art in London for the London Short Film Festival, through to the Seattle Trans Film Festival, and the largest public billboard in Europe, the Piccadilly Lights, with CIRCA. Later on, the film developed into future performances such as a solo dance that the multi-talented artist presented at Performance Space New York for a night of queer and trans performances at the event Generative/Unproductive, organized by Anto(n) Astudillo. Ratanavanh moves between mediums with as much agility as he does on stage, or between cultures and continents.

But success comes with a responsibility, a weight they feel as a first-generation East/Southeast Asian artist. The pressure to make something truly impactful, the fear of not doing justice to the privilege of creating — it’s a feeling many immigrants can relate to.

“It is a privilege to create,” Ratanavanh admits. “To have the time, resources, means, and support to do so in various forms. But I’ve had to learn that making art is not just this ‘extra’ thing you get to do at the end of the day or the end of life when you’ve satisfactorily molded yourself to society and its ideas of success. It’s quite the opposite, it’s also a way to imagine and dream, to shape a life.”

Through their art, Ratanavanh fights for queer, trans, and immigrant voices to be heard and dreams to be made real.