Tiffany Chung: indelible traces

Tiffany Chung: indelible traces is the first comprehensive museum survey of Houston-based artist Tiffany Chung. Including more than 70 artworks that highlight Chung’s expansive 25-year career, the exhibition engages with histories that have too often been overlooked or intentionally ignored. Through her materially meticulous and deeply research-driven work, Chung excavates complex and often hidden entanglements—of history, politics, geography, economy, and climate. Best known for her intricately drawn and embroidered maps, a major part of Chung’s work interrogates the systemic causes of migration. 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. She often mines the histories of single sites to reveal systems of power and cycles of transformation—natural or human-made, resilient or destructive—across stretches of geological and generational time. Chung employs extensive archival research to fill in the gaps that official histories and popular discourses overlook or intentionally disremember. She merges individual voices and collective memories with landscapes as active sites of remembrance through her rigorous research and qualitative analysis to challenge the power of mapping and grand historical narratives. Ultimately, her artworks question not only how history is told but also who tells that history, who belongs within it, and who and what are excluded. The exhibition was produced by the AD&A Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara and curated by Dr. Orianne Cacchione, Deputy Director at the University of Richmond Museums.