Marcia Heller, Noozhawk Copy Editor
November 17, 2025 | 9:00 am
The Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A Museum) at UC Santa Barbara will present the exhibition titled Tiffany Chung: indelible traces, the first comprehensive museum survey of Vietnamese American artist Tiffany Chung.
The exhibition brings together more than 70 artworks that showcase the breadth of the artist’s 25-year career.
Organized by the AD&A Museum and guest curated by Orianna Cacchione, deputy director at the University of Richmond Museums, the show opens Saturday, Jan. 17 with a public reception, 5:30-7:30 p.m., and runs through April 26. Gallery hours are noon-5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
Chung works pointedly reveal histories that have too often been overlooked or intentionally ignored, the AD&A Museum said.
“She excavates the complex and often hidden entanglements — of history, politics, geography, economy, and climate — that accrue and shape landscapes, built environments, conflicts, and human migration,” according to the museum.
Best known for her intricately drawn and embroidered maps, a major part of Chung’s work interrogates the nexus of the climate-conflict crisis, which views climate disasters and armed conflicts as dual systemic causes of forced migration. However, Chung’s conceptual focus is much broader than this frame implies.
Beyond charting human movements, her work unravels and reweaves the entwined relationships between nature and human societies, studying the migrations of flora and fauna — particularly spices, along with the cross-border trajectories of foods, cultures, and languages.
She often mines the histories of single sites to reveal systems of power and cycles of transformation — natural or human-made, resilient or destructive — across stretches of geological and generational time.
Chung employs archival research to fill in the gaps that official histories and popular discourses overlook or intentionally disremember.
She merges individual voices and collective memories with landscapes as active sites of remembrance through her rigorous research and qualitative analysis to challenge the power of mapping and grand historical narratives.
Ultimately, her artworks question not only how history is told but also who tells that history, who belongs within it, and who and what are excluded, the museum said.