TIffany Chung: scratching the walls of memory

It is with great pleasure that we welcome back Tiffany Chung for her second solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art. In the two years since her last show with us, Play (2008), she has been very active on the international scene, participating in exhibitions on four continents.

In 2009, she was featured in So Close Yet So Far Away: Incheon International Women Artists’ Biennale in Incheon, South Korea; A Starting Point: Intrude 36 – Dynamics of Change and Growth at Zendai MoMA, Shanghai; and in group shows in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Milan. So far in 2010, her work has been shown in Ascending Dragon: Contemporary Vietnamese Arts at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California; The River Project at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia; and in a solo exhibition in Berlin. She has been selected to participate in the Singapore Biennale in 2011.

For her current exhibition, scratching the walls of memory, Chung presents a new body of work inspired by maps of urban regions, featuring embroidery and appliqué works on canvas. Chung has long been fascinated with maps, not only for their graphic possibilities but also for what they say about our relation to the past and our visions of the future. Over the past few years, she has produced an ongoing series of works on paper based on urban planning maps that evoke the utopian visions and often harsh dislocations of our rapidly developing world.

Delving deeper into the historical record, her current exhibition explores the topographic after-images of some of the past century’s most traumatic conflicts and includes maps of the Berlin Wall, the Korean DMZ, and the atomic bomb blast zones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The surfaces of her canvas maps are encrusted with beads and rhinestones, layered with embroidery, and punctured with metal grommets, creating richly textured, three dimensional landscapes whose beauty contrasts starkly with the somber historical realities they chart out.

CATALOGUE ESSAY
Please click here to view the exhibition catalogue essay by Zoe Butt.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My recent series of maps on canvas is process-oriented, poignantly examining important historical events of the 20th century caused by clashing ideologies that led to the tragic experiences of the Berlin Wall and Vietnam Conflict, as well as the horrific destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to name a few. Each map involves my doing research, drawing layouts of old maps (from the periods of those traumatic events) on canvas, embroidering railways, roads and river systems. At the final stage I pierce holes on canvas and secure them with painted metal grommets and buttons one by one, mapping all areas with colored dots and eyelets. This painstaking process meditates on the memory and experience of trauma and tragedy, which leave mental scars in the human psyche – whether it’s a cessation of feeling, psychic closing off, or sensory panic.

ARTIST CV
Please click here to view Tiffany Chung’s CV.

EXHIBITION DATES
Nov. 4, 2010 – Jan. 8, 2011

GALLERY HOURS
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm