About 3 — Tiffany Chung

Biography

Tiffany Chung is globally noted for her interdisciplinary and research-based practice consisting of hand-drawn and embroidered cartographic works, paintings, photographs, sculptures, texts, and videos. Chung’s artistic praxis reflects her intellectual inquiries into a complex framework of social, political, economic and environmental processes, at times entwined in landscape archaeology and historical ecology. Cultivated through archival and field research into specific locales, her projects excavate layers of history to unpack conflict, geopolitical partitioning, spatial transformation, environmental disaster, forced displacement and migration, across time and terrain. Chung’s work strives to create interventions into the narrative produced through statecraft or is dominant in the public sphere, with cultural memories and lived experiences.

Chung’s temporary prototype monument on the National Mall, For the Living [Constitution Gardens west, adjacent to Vietnam Veterans Memorial] is part of Beyond Granite: Pulling Together (2023)—the first outdoor exhibition in the history of the Mall that asks a central question: ”what stories remain untold on the National Mall?” Her large scale earthwork traces the global routes of Southeast Asian refugees in the aftermath of the ‘Vietnam War’ on a world map without national boundaries, prompting visitors to reflect on their own journeys of migration while remembering that the cost of this war is also absorbed by people from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, including Hmong. Chung’s current exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, Tiffany Chung: Rise into the Atmosphere (2023-2025) comprises immersive sonic and visual works that navigate the media-saturated images of places known as ‘conflict zones’ to remember and reimagine the landscapes, cultures, and peoples–with their agency, dreams, and hopes–beneath ruined cities and fractured countries.

Chung’s 2019 solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue, is her most ambitious exploration of the war in Vietnam and its aftermath to date – with an approach that mirrors the multiplicity of her subject, subsuming her own voice to those of others and tackling her theme from various perspectives. The exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times and listed by The Art Newspaper as 2019’s most popular art exhibitions globally. The first iteration of Chung’s Syria Project was featured in the 56th Venice Biennale’s central exhibition All the World’s Futures at the Arsenale, with 40 map-based drawings that chart Syria’s ever expanding cycles of violence and refugee displacement — which was described as one of the personal but highly political highlights from the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Chung has exhibited at museums and biennials worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), British Museum (UK), Louisiana MoMA (Denmark), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Germany), Nobel Peace Center (Norway), Sharjah Biennale (UAE), Biennial de Cuenca (Ecuador), Sydney Biennale (Australia), Statens Museum for Kunst (Denmark), EVA International–Ireland’s Biennial, Centre de Cultura Conteporània de Barcelona (Spain), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Japan), among other venues. Public collections include Smithsonian American Art Museum, British Museum, Louisiana MoMA, SFMoMA, Minneapolis Institute of Art, M+ Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Singapore Art Museum and others.

Tiffany Chung was a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at RITM, Yale University (2021) and a finalist for the Vera List Center Prize for Art & Social Justice (2018-2020). Chung has been a recipient of other awards, including Asia Society Arts Game Changer Award, India (2020); Asian Cultural Council Grant (2015); Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize for Exceptional Contribution (2013). She is a co-founder of Sàn Art, an independent art space in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Chung holds an MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara (2000) and a BFA from California State University, Long Beach (1998).