Tiffany Chung

About

Tiffany Chung was born in Da Nang, Vietnam. She is considered to be part of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her family emigrated to the United States after the Vietnam War. She studied art in California earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, Long Beach and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2000, she returned to Vietnam to establish her art practice and contribute to the growing community of contemporary artists.

She is best known for her "embroidered canvas maps, cartographic drawings, videos, performance work, and installations." Her artwork is held in the following public art collections: Orange County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia), Singapore Art Museum, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates).

Work

Tiffany Chung's work spans both space and time representing a range of urban spaces at different moments in time, sometimes simultaneously. She is known for the diversity of her art practice, as well as the deep research that informs each piece, and the critical lens applied to socio-political issues.

For the 7th Asian Pacific Triennal of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery curator Angela Goddard noted about Chung:

Chung's diverse oeuvre deploys the associative qualities of conceptual art with a concern for pressing social issues, including the significant influence of conflict, migration and environmental degradation. In contrast to works by many contemporary Vietnamese artists who are exploring traumatic historical narratives, Chung's work is polished and glossy, even often saccharine beautiful, despite her politically-engaged approach."

This critical approach is most notable in her cartographic art and her three-dimensional installation art. According to the Sharjah Art Foundation:

"Tiffany Chung’s cartographic and installation works examine conflict, migration, urban progress and transformation in relation to history and cultural memory. She explores the recovery and growth of cities damaged by war or natural disaster, looking at both the physical site and the psychological realm of its inhabitants."

On the topic of her cartographic art, art critic and curator Xiaoyu Weng has noted:

"Often based on old urban plans and gridlike official surveys, Chung's vivid, abstracted maps foreground the cultural memories and histories specific to each region."

"Archaeology Project for Future Remembrance" (2013)

In 2013, Chung had another exhibition at Galerie Quynh in Hochiminh City called "Archaeology Project for Future Remembrance". This project reflects on the 657-hectare master-planned new urban area in Ho Chi Minh City over Saigon river.

Six Lines of Flight (2012)

Chung was featured in the San Francisco Museum of Art's Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art, as one of several artists from six cities with "burgeoning art scenes". The "Six Lines of Flight" depicts the map of San Francisco in the year 1906. According to her, the 1906 fire in San Francisco is one of the most important 20th century events. A map represents not just a border for cities and various people, but a depiction of events that affect a group of people. These cities reflect the expansion of art in beyond the global centers of New York City, Paris, London, or Los Angeles, and included Beirut, Lebanon, Cali; Cluj-Napoca, Ho Chi Minh City, Tangier, and San Francisco.

Stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world (2011)

In 2011, Chung was one of 63 artists from 30 countries included in the Singapore Biennale, titled "Open House". Her contribution, stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world was a mixed media-installation, "a miniature model of a floating town" based upon scenes of floating communities of the Mekong Delta and Srinagar, India, and Japan. According to Weng:

Questioning and reassessing a failed utopian vision--the Arcology design movement, which aimed to minimize human impact on natural resources while enabling extremely high population density--Chung proposes new ways of adapting vernacular structures to address environmental issues and to reshape the present and future global landscape."

Play (2008)

Play is a photo series representing Vietnamese female students and an anomalous "Bubble Shooter" on Northern Vietnamese roads, is featured in the book, Contemporary Photography in Asia. According to the book: "Referencing images of the heroic working class found in North Vietnamese socialist propaganda paintings, the Play series explores the unlikely relationship between contemporary youth culture and socialist ideology. Play attempts to question the relevancy of past ideology within the context of new utopian visions and pop culture obsessed youths. It examines the slippages between Vietnam's wartime rhetoric and its present shift towards consumer culture."

Collaborations

In 2007, Chung co-founded the non-profit art space Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City) along with Dinh Q. Lê and Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Phunam Thuc Ha of the Propeller Group.

Awards