BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (SAAM) -- Exhibit: Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past is Prologue

DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (SAAM) -- Exhibit: Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past is Prologue:

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Description of Pictures: Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past is Prologue
March 15, 2019 – September 2, 2019
Internationally acclaimed artist Tiffany Chung (b. 1969, Da Nang, Vietnam) is known for her multimedia work that explores migration, conflict, and shifting geographies in the wake of political and natural upheavals. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has invited her to present work that responds to the Vietnam War, and its legacy on the culture and population of the United States. The project stems from the facts of her own life: Chung’s father was a pilot in the South Vietnamese army who fought alongside American forces, and the family immigrated to the U.S. as part of the post-1975 exodus from that country. Chung examines the narratives that have been used to understand the war and its aftermath, and probes how the America we know today was shaped by Vietnam. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with SAAM’s major exhibition Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975.
Sarah Newman, The James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art, is organizing the exhibition.

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[1] TIFCHU_190314_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] TIFCHU_190314_12.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] TIFCHU_190314_15.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[4] TIFCHU_190314_18.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] TIFCHU_190314_22.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] TIFCHU_190314_25.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[7] TIFCHU_190314_29.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[8] TIFCHU_190314_32.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[9] TIFCHU_190314_39.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. TIFCHU_190314_01.JPG: Remapping History: An autopsy of a battle, an excavation of a man's past Tiffany Chung's father was a helicopter pilot in an elite squadron of the South Vietnamese Air Force. Fighting alongside American forces, he was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese for fourteen years. After his release,he moved to the United States with his family. While the outlines of his story are known, the details of his experience remain elusive, even to his daughter. Remapping History is Chung's attempt to unearth them by returning to Vietnam and tracing his steps,creating a meticulously researched and plotted diagram of her discoveries. Documentary materials record her father's movements during the War and the major battles and events that affected him; a parallel sequence of events interspersed throughout documents the artist's own journey while piecing it together. Part historical timeline, part personal scrapbook, the installation asks in a visceral way whose stories get remembered and how individual memories intersect with larger recorded narratives.Anchored by established events,it explores most poignantly a daughter's attempts to imaginatively recreate her father's story
2. TIFCHU_190314_25.JPG: The Vietnam Exodus Project: reconstructing history from fragmented records and half-lived lives Here Chung takes a broad view of thelegacy of the War, focusing on collective experience and transmuting personal memory into an expanded official history. With maps, documents, and watercolors, she offers a model for how an individual can engage with history and global trauma writ large. In the center of the gallery are documents from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, where Chung researched largely unstudied records from agencies that dealt with Vietnamese migrants. Along with her interviews of resettled people,Chung used the information she collected to understand the breadth of migration and create maps that show a new, fuller view of how the contemporary world was formed. Viewed in accumulation, Chung's work questions what we know about the Vietnam War. Illuminating the malleability of memory and the foreignness of the past, she interrogates how we understand history as much as its agreed-upon facts. We come away comprehending less and understanding more.
3. TIFCHU_190314_29.JPG: Reconstructing an Exodus History; Flight routes from camps and of ODP cases 2017 This map represents the forced migration of South Vietnamese refugees by plane in Asia and through the Orderly Departure Program to locations all over the world thirty-five years ago. In one comprehensive summary, it shows how Vietnam's people and culture fanned out across the globe after the War. To map out the trajectories, Chung combined interviews, archival research,andthe history of commercial carriers' pathways and capacities. While the result documents a previously unexamined phenomenon, its historiographic function never supersedes its status as a work of art. The laboriously and delicately embroidered global escape routes that stretch across oceans evoke the migrants' poignant and tenuous real-life journeys
4. TIFCHU_190314_32.JPG: I asked Tiffany why every other country was represented by its two-character country code -- "BS" and "CU" and "MX" -- but the US was represented by "USA". She said she hadn't thought about it.
5. TIFCHU_190314_60.JPG: Reconstructing an Exodus History: boat trajectories in Asia 2017
6. TIFCHU_190315_13.JPG: Tiffany Chung Vietnam, Past Is Prologue
7. TIFCHU_190315_23.JPG: Tiffany Chung (b. 1969, Đ� Nẵng, Viet Nam) excavates a history hidden in plain sight for the past forty-five years.Her subject, the War in Vietnam (1955–75),has achieved a nearly mythic significance in the United States.In Vietnam, "the War"devastated life as it had been known, dividing time into a"before" and "after."Yet missing from the narratives told by these two sides is the perspective of the South Vietnamese, on whose behalf the Americans entered the War, and for whom Tiffany Chung aims to give voice in Vietnam,Past Is Prologue. Through her meticulously drawn and stitched maps, emotional interviews, and intensive archival research, Chung explores their experience, from the intimate to the global.She begins with a fine-grained look into one person's story -- that of her father, who fought for the South Vietnamese military during the War; widens out to encompass the stories of former refugees from Vietnam; and pulls out further still to show the global effects of their collective migration in the War's wake. The project is personal, stemming from Chung's own life.After her father spent fourteen years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, Chung's family immigrated to the United States.She witnessed war, fled her country, and reconstituted her life as an American, first in Los Angeles, and then in Houston where she lives today.The exhibition features Vietnamese voices from American cities -- including those from nearby Falls Church, Virginia -- who were part of the large-scale immigration that reshaped this country's culture. Foregrounding stories left out of official histories, Chung reframes the legacies of war. Vietnam, Past Is Prologue is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975, located on the museum's third floor. Please be aware that some videos contain language describing graphic violence.
8. TIFCHU_190315_24.JPG: Because of Her Story
9. TIFCHU_190315_51.JPG: The Vietnam Exodus History Learning Project: the exodus, the camps and the half-lived lives 2017 In this series, Chung commissioned a group of young artists from present-day Ho Chi Minh City to make watercolors based on photographs of the refugee crisis in the late 1970s and '80s. The images -- - heart-wrenching and unsurprising to those familiar with the country's forced migration -- were previously unknown to the artists painting them, having grown up in a country whose textbooks and public discourse do not acknowledge the crisis. Through the process, the artists begin to recover parts of their own past, and Chung effectively collapses the distinction between art and history, using one to understand the other.
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2019 photos: Overnight trips this year: (May, August, October, December) Four trips to New York City (including the United Nations, Flushing, and the New York Comic-Con), (July) My 14th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con (including sites in Utah). (August) Massachusetts (Boston, Stockbridge, and Springfield) to experie/nce rain in another state, and (August) Asheville, NC to visit Dad and his wife Dixie. Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Number of photos taken this year: about 582,000.
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