Tiffany Chung
Quick Facts
Biography
Tiffany Chung (born 1969) is a Vietnamese American multimedia artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Early life and education
Chung was born in Da Nang, Vietnam. She is considered to be part of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her family emigrated to the United States after the Vietnam War. She studied art in California earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, Long Beach and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2000, she returned to Vietnam to establish her art practice and contribute to the growing community of contemporary artists.
Career
Chung is best known for her "embroidered canvas maps, cartographic drawings, videos, performance work, and installations." Her artwork is held in the following public art collections: Orange County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia), Singapore Art Museum, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates). Her solo exhibition Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue was presented at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2019.
Play is a photo series representing Vietnamese female students and an anomalous "Bubble Shooter" on Northern Vietnamese roads, is featured in the book, Contemporary Photography in Asia. According to the book: "Referencing images of the heroic working class found in North Vietnamese socialist propaganda paintings, the Play series explores the unlikely relationship between contemporary youth culture and socialist ideology. Play attempts to question the relevancy of past ideology within the context of new utopian visions and pop culture obsessed youths. It examines the slippages between Vietnam's wartime rhetoric and its present shift towards consumer culture."
In 2011, Chung was one of 63 artists from 30 countries included in the Singapore Biennale, titled "Open House". Her contribution, stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world was a mixed media-installation, "a miniature model of a floating town" based upon scenes of floating communities of the Mekong Delta and Srinagar, India, and Japan.
Chung was featured in the San Francisco Museum of Art's Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art, as one of several artists from six cities with "burgeoning art scenes". The "Six Lines of Flight" depicts the map of San Francisco in the year 1906. According to her, the 1906 fire in San Francisco was one of the most important events of the 20th century. A map represents not just a border for cities and various people, but a depiction of events that affect a group of people. These cities reflect the expansion of art in beyond the global centers of New York City, Paris, London, or Los Angeles, and included Beirut, Lebanon, Cali; Cluj-Napoca, Ho Chi Minh City, Tangier, and San Francisco.
Collaborations
In 2007, Chung co-founded the non-profit art space Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City) along with Dinh Q. Lê and Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Phunam Thuc Ha of the Propeller Group.