Vietnamese-American Artist Tiffany Chung Maps Displacement and Memory From Her Houston Studio
•February 27, 2026
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Why It Matters
Chung’s map‑based art forces policymakers and audiences to confront hidden human costs of displacement, reshaping how societies remember and respond to refugee crises.
Key Takeaways
- •Chung uses maps to reveal erased refugee histories.
- •Her interdisciplinary practice blends art, research, and activism.
- •She documents Vietnamese refugee experiences beyond official statistics.
- •Maps serve as protest against political historical amnesia.
- •Work emphasizes personal memory to humanize displacement narratives.
Summary
The video profiles Vietnamese‑American artist Tiffany Chung, who works from her Houston studio to map displacement and collective memory, turning cartography into a medium for storytelling and protest.
Chung describes a research‑driven practice that fuses painting, sculpture, photography, video and new media with landscape archaeology and historical ecology. She maps the U.S. military’s global footprint, charts piracy attacks on Vietnamese refugee boats in the Gulf of Thailand in December 1985, and records precise coordinates and eyewitness testimonies, illustrating how official records often omit lived experience.
She explains, “If you want to tell a very difficult story, you get them in first and then you punch them in the gut,” emphasizing that maps must both inform and evoke emotional resonance. Her three‑year immersion with Vietnamese refugees—sharing meals, rides, and songs—produced a body of work that re‑writes data into narrative form, challenging political amnesia.
By reclaiming visual space for erased histories, Chung’s work urges policymakers, scholars, and the public to confront the human cost of displacement, suggesting that art‑based research can reshape refugee discourse and influence future humanitarian responses.
Original Description
Working with maps, sculptures, paintings, and digital media, Vietnam-born, US-based artist Tiffany Chung examines the human consequences of war and migration through intense research and personal engagement. Taking cues from cartography, Chung engages with the entanglements between political, social, economic, and environmental processes, using her works to question official narratives that try to disavow individual voices and experiences, and to communicate stories threatened with erasure.
Welcoming Art Basel into her Houston studio for the profile series Meet the artists, Chung invites conversation about art intended – not simply to chart territories – but to trace the movement of people, and persistent memories, bringing to light the dangers of historical amnesia....read more at nowness.com
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