Tiffany Chung poignantly provokes a closer inspection of what lies in front of our eyes. The presentation of her oeuvre is always immaculately beautiful, enticing, attractive. If inspected closely, and with a keen eye and some historical guidance, colourful lines, patterns and decorations conceal truths and realities that are otherwise hardly noticeable. What is brilliantly designed and conceived, also represents the destinies — materplans, histories and transformations — that have deeply impacted the worlds Chung so attentively researches and explores.
Located on the ninth and tenth floors of a W26th Street building in New York City, Davidson Gallery is featuring one of Chung’s least internationally exposed projects focusing on a specific area of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as well as a new body of work that looks at the history of a region of Vietnam bordering with Cambodia. Separated between the two floors, the exhibitions have a continuity between them, leading the viewer from one place to another in Vietnam, in a journey through its history and its socio-political and environmental transformation.
On the ninth floor, “Terra Rouge: Circles, Traces of Time, Rebellious Solitude” presents new cartographic drawings and paintings on vellum that zoom in on southwestern Vietnam, on the border with Cambodia, and specifically on the Bình Long–Phước Long plateau region — today’s Bình Phước province. This area has lived through an eventful history, from colonialism to conflict. Towards the end of the 19th century, French colonialists set up some of the first rubber plantations here and in adjacent Cambodia. The region also witnessed some of the most violent fighting during the 1972 Easter Offensive during the Vietnam War.
However, it is the archaeological discovery of Neolithic circular earthworks dating from 2300- 300 BCE that are the subject of investigation of Chung’s new series. In the artist’s unique way of research and exploration, her works look into these mysterious formations, while examining the civilisation that existed there for nearly 2000 years before the site was abandoned. Chung not only explores how they lived and why they left, but she also imagines what could have become of them if they had stayed.
And here, as we travel alongside the artist fantasising about the long lost civilisation and its alternative future, we step into another world, one that takes us to southern Vietnam’s most urbanised area and its largest city today — Saigon, present day Ho Chi Minh City.
Featured for the first time outside of Asia at the Joahnn Jacobs Museum in Zurich in 2018, “Archaeology for Future Remembrance” takes over the tenth floor of Davidson Gallery, and engages with the history and transformation of Ho Chi Minh City’s Thủ Thiêm district. A residential zone located on the other side of the Saigon River from the centre of town, it was razed to the ground by the Vietnamese government starting from 2002 to make space for a new urban development masterplan for a modern residential and commercial area.
Its destruction resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands of residents, who were dislocated to far flung places with very little compensation. Not only a social aberration, the project completely turned the district into a deserted location full of rubble and, popularly believed, ghosts. Chung’s own project was an effort to preserve the memory of the original site and its people after they had suffered a prolonged and violent eviction process. The artist conducted excavations on the site, unearthing evidence of its previous life, including fragments of buildings, shoes, clothes and household items.
Eric Harms, Professor of Anthropology & Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, starts his 2013 essay on Chung’s project thus:
Tiffany Chung’s work reworks, parodies, and unmasks the pretentions of masterplans, all while playfully engaging with the creative energy and the dreamworlds that plans inspire. Beauty mingles with ruination, colorful fantasy frames grey rubble, and creative inspiration infuses and is infused by frustrated spirit and loss. Chung’s own masterplan, one might say, is to make masterplans into objects of contemplation, to put plans in their place, to both appreciate and question them. In so doing, Chung highlights the great power they hold—as sources of both hope and destruction.
Indeed, Chung’s works display such energy, beauty and power, while also carrying a deeply melancholic sense of loss. Alongside fragments of life, like old shoes, floor tiles, house windows, the artist also has created her signature drawings, video and a series of 26 etched glass plates titled “wasteland”, displaying text that references the inexorability of progress and land reclamation under the guise of colonialism and nation-building.
As Prof. Harms writes, “Beautiful plans, like so many other beautiful works of the mind, are founded on choices and decisions, which suppress alternatives and obscure other possibilities.” Chung’s examination of such plans, her investigation of what has been lost in the process and the preservation of memory for future generations displays a willingness to contribute to the creation of a human consciousness that is more attentive to social needs, historical lessons and environmental concerns. Set against the backdrop of New York City, itself reclaimed land, the exhibitions at Davidson Gallery delve into the history of an apparently far away land, while tackling issues that are rather universally applicable, subtly suggesting we look to our past in order to learn from our mistakes and successes, in the attempt to create a better future.