Tiffany Chung is internationally renowned for her research-based installations and cartographic works that examine migration, urban transformation, and environmental impact in specific geographic locations. Her work remaps historical and cultural memories of disturbed topographies and proposes alternate histories that focus on personal remembrance in order to highlight the roots of forced migration and its inextricable links to sociopolitical, economic, and environmental factors.

In her Terra Rouge series, Chung examines an area in southwest Vietnam that features archaeological vestiges of circular earthworks. These excavated sites, dating from 2300 to 300 BCE, are the remains of a self-sustaining civilization that lived there for nearly 2,000 years before abandoning the area. Chung explores how the population lived and models an ecologically sustainable society. The region was later occupied by an extensive network of rubber plantations established in the late nineteenth century by French colonialists. In more recent history, it was frequented by Chung’s father, a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. Chung visited the site and photographed the abandoned airfields, then rendered the circular earth forms in paint and layers of hand-perforated vellum for her Terra Rouge series. 

About the artist: Tiffany Chung (b. 1969, Đà Nẵng, Viet Nam) holds an MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara (2000) and a BFA from California State University, Long Beach (1998). Chung has received numerous awards, including the inaugural KAVAH Fermata Artist Prize and Fellowship at the University of Chicago. She was a Mellon Arts and Practitioner Fellow at RITM, Yale University (2021), and she was named Jane Lombard Fellow for Art and Social Justice (2018–2020). Chung was awarded the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2013) and received the 2020 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India by Asia Society.

Chung has exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the British Museum, London; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main; Nobel Peace Center; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; among others. Her work is in public collections, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the British Museum, London; Louisiana MoMA, Denmark; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Minneapolis Institute of Art; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; and many others. Chung lives and works in Houston.