Tiffany Chung
Tiffany Chung | Indelible traces at AD&A Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Tiffany Chung: indelible traces is the first comprehensive museum survey of Vietnamese American artist, Tiffany Chung (born 1969; MFA, UCSB ’00). Including more than 70 artworks that highlight Chung’s expansive 25-year career, these works pointedly reveal histories that have too often been overlooked or intentionally ignored. She excavates the complex and often hidden entanglements—of history, politics, geography, economy, and climate—that accrue and shape landscapes, built environments, conflicts, and human migration.
Best known for her intricately drawn and embroidered maps, a major part of Chung’s work interrogates the nexus of the climate-conflict crisis, which views climate disasters and armed conflicts as dual systemic causes of forced migration. However, Chung’s conceptual focus is much broader than this frame implies. Beyond charting human movements, her work unravels and reweaves the entwined relationships between nature and human societies, studying the migrations of flora and fauna—particularly spices, along with the cross-border trajectories of foods, cultures, and languages.
Following the presentation at the AD&A Museum, the exhibition will embark on a national tour traveling to the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota (Fall 2026) and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston (Summer 2027).
