Tiffany Chung: indelible traces is the first comprehensive museum survey of Vietnamese American artist, Tiffany Chung (born 1969; MFA, UCSB ’00). Including more than 70 artworks that highlight Chung’s expansive 25-year career, these works pointedly reveal histories that have too often been overlooked or intentionally ignored. 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. 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 extensive 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.

Following the presentation at the AD&A Museum, the exhibition will embark on a national tour traveling to the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota (Fall 2026) and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston (Summer 2027).

Tiffany Chung: indelible traces is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum and is guest curated by Orianna Cacchione, Deputy Director at the University of Richmond Museums. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation. Additional support provided by UCSB’s Art Equity Commons, the Billy Rose Foundation, and the AD&A Museum Council.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Tiffany Chung (born 1969, Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam; lives in Houston, Texas) is an interdisciplinary artist globally recognized for her research-driven practice exploring the intersections of history, culture, and geography on both local and global scales. Working across diverse media—including cartography, embroidery, painting, photography, sculpture, video, text, and music—her projects trace shifts in cultural, geopolitical, and natural landscapes shaped by the upheavals of war, displacement, disaster, and global trade. Chung earned a BFA in Photography at California State University, Long Beach (1998), and an MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2000). She is currently an inaugural KAVAH Fermata Fellow at the University of Chicago. Previously, she was a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) (2021) and served as Jane Lombard Fellow for Art & Social Justice at the Vera List Center, New School (2018–20).

Chung has exhibited her artwork widely in the United States and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include Vietnam, Past Is Prologue at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2019) and Rise Into the Atmosphere at the Dallas Museum of Art (2023–25), as well as presentations at Lumiar Cité/Maumaus, Lisbon, Portugal (2019); Johann Jacobs Museum, Zürich, Switzerland (2018); Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2016); Kenpoku Art at the Hitachi City Museum, Ibaraki, Japan (2016); and Lieu-Commun, Toulouse, France (2014). Her work has been featured in major exhibitions and biennials throughout the world. Exhibitions include, most recently, Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, as part of PST Art (2024–25); Are you Ready? Surge to 2030: Enhancing Ambition in Asia-Pacific to Accelerate Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDRR Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (2024); After Rain: Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024); For the Living, part of Beyond Granite: Pulling Together at the National Mall in Washington, DC (2023). Biennials include the 56th Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Gwangju Biennale, Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador), EVA International (Ireland). Her work has also been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the British Museum (London), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany), the Nobel Peace Center (Oslo, Norway), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk, Denmark), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, M+ museum (Hong Kong), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa (Japan), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), among others. Chung has received the Asia Arts Game Changer Award (2020), the Asian Cultural Council Grant (2015), and Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize for Exceptional Contribution (2013).