TIFFANY CHUNG: entangled traces, disremembered landscapes

Kiang Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong
20 March - 6 May 2023

In Entangled Traces, Disremembered Landscape, Chung continues her ever-deepening exploration of geopolitics, history, and memory, marking critical shifts in historical narratives by tracing the entanglements of nature, culture, colonialism, war, and state-making, and introducing pivotal temporal aspects to the act of mapping. The exhibition features three of Chung’s interwoven projects that exemplify her committed interdisciplinary practice.

Chung’s series Terra Rouge: circles, traces of time, rebellious solitude (2022) uncovers the Bình Long–Phước Long plateau’s traumatic past as the site of sprawling French colonial rubber plantations and violent battles of the 1972 Easter Offensive in Vietnam, while depicting the region’s Neolithic circular earthwork sites and studying how these groups coexisted with nature as a way to imagine a different future.

USM Global (2018-2023) comprises maps and an online research archive that track the U.S. military global footprint and spotlight Sub-Saharan countries, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as Okinawa (Japan). It also includes works referencing Hawai’i as a traumatic site of memory: transpacific migration, plantation labor, economic expansion, and military imperialism—as well as unpacking how the United States’ commercial interests intertwined with its Cold War policy and political influence in places such as Guatemala.

The final chapter of Chung’s Vietnam Exodus Project is a three-channel video entitled If Water Has Memories (2022), which performs a symbolic burial for refugees who were attacked by pirates at sea in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and maps the locations of these atrocities in the Gulf of Thailand. As the exhibition reveals, Chung’s works are not only investigations of fraught geopolitical histories but also poignant acts of remembrance for people caught in conflict, paving the way for hope and healing.