LUMIAR CITÉ

Tiffany Chung
Thu Thiêm: an archaeological
project for future remembrance
08.06. - 06.10.2019

Info
Press-Release (port)
Press-Release (eng)
Exhibition View

Tiffany Chung, 1972 Thủ Thiêm Development Plan by US AID (Agency for International Development), 2013, detail. Courtesy of the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York.

The material residues of past eras and empires have long been the focus of archaeology. Tricks of the trade include poking and picking that reshuffles historical sediments – layers of history and objects embedded in the soil – unearthing artefacts that don’t necessarily reveal a greater message than their own material presence. These objects are mute and while some of them implore us to examine them further, we still can’t discern from which depths of history these pleas emanate or even what they are trying to say to us.

In her first exhibition in Portugal, the Vietnamese-American artist Tiffany Chung presents Thủ Thiêm: an archaeological project for future remembrance at Lumiar Cité. Chung excavates ruins and urban waste to reveal objects: children’s shoes, window frames, tiles and the like. The artist’s excavation site, called Thủ Thiêm, is an old city quarter in Saigon (Vietnam). The objects that Chung encounters in her archaeological exploration aren’t necessarily exceptional things. They are rather trivial witnesses of an everyday and bygone life that still resonates within the objects: they ‘tell’ us of the presence of the French colonial power in Indochina, just as they speak of the sentimental value of a porcelain rice bowl. Chung also deploys the medium of the ‘map’ as a tool for her artistic creations. The maps of early European explorers were initially characterised by blank spaces, which, little by little, were filled in. Without the discipline of cartography, the entire project of the modern, of appro- priation, surveying and plundering (some parts) of the world and by extension of rewriting the landscape – would all have been well nigh impossible. Maps are not neutral documents; they have a centre from which they determine proportions and relationships of the whole.

Thủ Thiêm once was a lively quarter, an urban organism, which was overwritten – through a masterplan, an optimistic makeover of the urban space, an exhaustive transformation that left nothing as it was before and tore at the social structures. This masterplan creates a type of tabula rasa and effaced history is met by the artist with a different plan: an artistic mapping that simultaneously captures the spiritual and historical dimensions of a place.

Tiffany Chung lives and works in Houston (USA). Recent projects and solo exhibitions include: ‘Vietnam, Past Is Prologue’, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); ‘Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter’, MoMA (New York); ‘All The World’s Futures’, 56th Venice Biennale; ‘IMPERMANENCIA Mutable Art in a Materialist Society’, XIII Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador); 10th Taipei Biennial (Taiwan); ‘Still (The) Barbarians’, EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial; ‘Illumination’, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk); ‘Sonsbeek’, Museum Arnhem (Netherlands); ‘Our Land/Alien Territory’, Central Manege (Moscow); ‘My Voice Would Reach You’, Rice University & Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); ‘Residual: Disrupted Choreographies’, Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain (Nîmes, France); Sharjah Biennial 11 (United Arab Emirates); California Pacific Triennial (Newport Beach); 7th Asia Pacifc Triennial (Brisbane); and ‘Six Lines of Flight’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.