Remapping History: an autopsy of a battle, an excavation of a man’s past | 2015-2019
from Vietnam, Past Is Prologue | Smithsonian American Art Museum | 2019
Stretching 40 feet across the wall, Chung’s thoroughly researched and plotted diagram comprises materials constructed through – and at times against – the archival: found and personal photographs, hand-drawn and embroidered maps, video footage, and texts. This diagram is Chung’s most biographical work to date, tracing her father’s footsteps as a helicopter pilot in an elite squadron of the South Vietnamese Air Force prior to being taken prisoner in Laos and kept in prison camps enforced with hard labor in North Việt Nam for 14 years. The detailed diagram documents her father’s movements during the war along with historical events and abandoned sites related to major battles that affected his fate, all interspersed with poetic texts depicting a parallel sequence of events in Chung’s own journey while piecing it together. As documentary route map, historical timeline, and personal scrapbook, the installation draws our attention to how individual memories intersect with larger historical narratives – the kind of personal histories relegated to the margins of public memory and social consciousness for the most part, in yield to the grand history that often shapes our world views.
Related Exhibitions:
Việt Nam, Past Is Prologue | Smithsonian American Art Museum | 2019
Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future | Taipei Biennial | 2016-2017
Sonsbeek '16 | Museum Arnhem, Netherlands | 2016
Land, Sea and Air | New Art Gallery Walsall, UK | 2016
Our Land/Alien Territory | Central Manege, Moscow | 2015
finding one's shadow in ruins and rubble | TRFA, New York | 2015