About
Antonius-Tín Bui is a polydisciplinary artist and shapeshifter invested in the transformative potential of improvisation, portraiture, craft, and ritual. A monsoon in a past life, they see themself most in movement—in wind, in the shifting blues of the sky, in the quiet sway between presence and disappearance. The child of Paul and Van Bui, two Vietnamese refugees who carved futures from grief and grit, Antonius-Tín carries their legacy in every gesture. Their work honors the spectral, the tender, and the unruly—crafting portals for what cannot be named, only felt, only danced with ancestral shadow.
Musings on hand-cut paper
My hand-cut paper practice is grounded in a subtractive process—an act of removal that reveals. This reductive method mirrors how so much of identity is shaped: not only by what we embrace, but by what we reject. As a queer, nonbinary person of color in America, my sense of self has been carved through refusals—through the “nos” that mark what is not for us. Each cut becomes a refusal of imposed roles and a declaration of possibility.
To cut is to reclaim. While the blade has long symbolized violence—colonial, medical, institutional—I wield it as a tool of transformation. “Going under the knife” on my own terms becomes a metaphor for healing, for reimagining the body and spirit beyond trauma. Each incision becomes a portal, a sacred undoing and becoming—a reclamation of agency, beauty, and breath.
I often merge flora and fauna with human forms to question anthropocentrism and emphasize our shared entanglement with the earth. Bodies in my work may bloom into petals, fracture into wings, or root into soil. These hybrids point toward a more interconnected, decolonial vision of being—one that honors the cyclical wisdom of nature, the resilience of queer ecologies, and the deep time of ancestral memory.
My hand-cut works are intimate monuments—simultaneously ornamental and political. They are prayers, thresholds, and mirrors. They hold absence as presence, shadow as substance. Through them, I insist on transformation not as a singular event, but as a continuous process of becoming—layered, unruly, and divine.
Some Slaysian Creatives I Admire (email me at abui@mica.edu if you know people I should aware of)
