we breathe & breathing is (an) a|synchronous music, every body needs the air (2021)
poetry text-art metal panels
11.875’ x 25’ x .25”
Vanport Building, Portland, Oregon
commissioned by Portland State University, OHSU, PCC, City of Portland

Poetry & Design: Dao Strom
with Vietnamese translation by Vi Khi Nao

Documentation + Text-Art + Bilingual Poetry Audio for “we breathe & breathing is an a|synchronous music, every body needs the air” (2021)
video, text-animation (5 min.)

poem, text design, video editing: Dao Strom
Vietnamese translation: Vi Khi Nao
voices: Dao Strom (English), Vi Khi Nao (Vietnamese)

video & audio commissioned by Portland State University, OHSU, PCC, City of Portland

This artwork is a part of the Vanport Building Art Collection, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU.

About the artwork

we breathe & breathing is (an) a|synchronous music, every body needs the air, 2020
Located on Vanport Building's south exterior wall, SW Harrison St.

About the artist

Dao Strom's primary material is language—which may articulate as text, music, image, sound, space, silence, and the intersections and juxtapositions of these elements in relation to one another. Using practices of fragmentation and assemblage, Strom "writes" arrangements of poetry, image, fragments, song, and sound, layering voices and their echoes, on the page and aurally, to be experienced as installation, performance, music, multimedia, and, more intimately, inside the spaces of a book. Reaching beyond a literate experience of reading, Strom’s work seeks to touch upon the ethos, textures, rhythms and musical frequencies involved in reading and receiving language.

These works were acquired through Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places Program, managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.