Chung has received significant acclaim for an ongoing practice of map drawings and mixed media works that could be described as cartographic abstractions or speculative topographies. Cultivated through archival and field research into specific locales, with landscapes ranging in scale from an airfield to a delta, an urban district to a continent, these images chart historical and/or projected changes to the physical and human landscape caused by urban planning, environmental disaster, geopolitical partitioning, and humanitarian crisis. This ongoing body of work began in 2007, when Chung began to intensively research cartography and urban planning maps related to redevelopment projects in Vietnam. Her cartographic practice has since then expanded into a repertoire of meticulously detailed maps, inquiring into an interwoven framework of complex issues that Chung’s praxis is known for.

 Chung’s maps either depict specific moments or diachronic layers of history, narrated through the visible effects of spatial transformation. Sourcing archival documents, topographic maps, cartogram charts, projected urban plans, infographics, and oral histories. Chung plays with such representations of space as captures of temporality, as documents of utopian and dystopian visions. By pushing and pulling, combining and isolating, punctuating and collecting elements of these isolated strata, they invoke the palimpsestic nature of cityscapes and nationscapes as they have undergone urban renewal or territorial restructuring. They are abstractions of abstractions, playing upon James C. Scott’s descriptions of maps as instruments designed to summarize, abstract, and render legible geographical and human landscapes.[1] Each map contains a complex system of coding, the legend for which the artist selectively provides. These legends are often informed by what is missing: the voices and memories of these landscapes’ inhabitants. Chung takes on the role of ethnographer and historian to further document what the cartographic records and statistics cannot: the lived experiences and personal accounts embedded in these topographies.

 As such, Chung’s maps visibly capture the artist’s efforts to both distill and express the density of history and experience that the 2-dimensional cartographic surface circumscribes. The crafted component of these drawings includes reticular topographical forms that are ornamental and exquisite, conveying a sense of organic growth, like a fungal spread under the lens of a microscope. But the beauty is methodological, yielding formal pleasure for conceptual intervention, an approach characterizing Chung’s larger body of work. As a long-term artistic praxis, her maps consistently employ near aesthetic excess to subtly reveal veiled pathologies of social and environmental degradation due to master planning and nation building projects, the fraught legacies of colonial ‘civilizing mission,’ and the riven human landscapes of geopolitical violence and natural disasters.   

[1] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 87.