Tiffany Chung: indelible traces

Tiffany Chung's indelible traces is open at The Weisman through December 6, and if you've never seen her work before, this is a good place to start. It's the first comprehensive survey of her career, organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara and curated by Orianna Cacchione. Chung was born in Da Nang, Vietnam, in 1969 and now lives in Houston, and her practice is built around research that crosses cartography, embroidery, painting, photography, sculpture, video, text, and music.

She uses all those different mediums to trace how cultural, geopolitical, and natural landscapes shift under the weight of war, displacement, disaster, and global trade. A lot of that comes back to maps. She draws on the Japanese concept of ma—the space between things—and uses it to challenge historical narratives written by those in power. In her hands, maps stop being neutral tools of geography and become personal records of loss, survival, memory, and resilience. It's a way of looking at the gaps in the official story and filling them with the human side of the picture.

There's a good bit of background to her work, too. She earned a BFA in Photography at California State University, Long Beach, in 1998 and an MFA at UC Santa Barbara in 2000. She was an inaugural KAVAH Fermata Fellow at the University of Chicago and a former Jane Lombard Fellow for Art & Social Justice at the Vera List Center, New School. Because indelible traces pulls from across her career, you get to see how those different threads—the maps, the embroidery, the research—come together.

If you want to hear more about it directly from the source, there's a conversation with Chung and curator Orianna Cacchione on Wednesday, October 28, at 6 PM. The exhibition is free and open to the public at The Weisman, 333 E River Road, Minneapolis, MN 55455, and it runs through December 6.