By Debra Herrick

Tiffany Chung works at a scale where the usual boundaries of history begin to dissolve. Climate, conflict and migration emerge not as separate events but as intertwined processes unfolding across time and geography. A Vietnamese American artist and UC Santa Barbara alumna, she brings that perspective to her survey exhibition at the university’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum. Through hand-drawn and embroidered maps, sculptural installations and immersive media, Chung traces those connections. Drawing on statistical data, archival research and lived experience, “Tiffany Chung: indelible traces” follows the movement of people, plants, commodities and ideas — from ancient trade routes to deep geological time. While much of the work reconstructs the past, it is equally concerned with what lies ahead. Several projects propose responses to climate change, from speculative models of adaptation to research that has entered policy conversations. Organized by the AD&A Museum and guest curated by Orianna Cacchione, deputy director at the University of Richmond Museums, the exhibition reflects a practice grounded in long-term research, where art becomes a means of rethinking the historical record.

MAPPING WHAT HISTORY OMITS

For Chung, mapping is not simply a tool for orientation, but a way of thinking. “I’ve been acutely aware of the power of cartography,” she says, noting its long association with colonial authority and state control. Yet mapping can also do the opposite; it can “counter official historical accounts, reclaim what has been erased, and shift established narratives.” Her work brings together statistical data, archival research and lived experience into layered visual compositions. These maps do not resolve history into a single account; they place competing histories side by side. They hold contradictions. While they translate information into image, they also make it “both legible and illegible,” revealing some histories while obscuring others, resisting the idea that the past can be fixed or fully known. “Maps draw out the complexity and the inaccessibility of the past,” Chung says. “They leave space for multiple perspectives.” As AD&A Museum Director Gabriel Ritter notes, her work “documents and gives voice to the memories etched into these landscapes,” taking on what maps and statistics cannot capture: lived experience.

MAKING CONNECTIONS VISIBLE

Many of Chung’s projects center on what she calls the climate-conflict-migration nexus — the entanglement of war, environmental change and human displacement. Her maps trace global refugee routes, fossil-fuel emissions and U.S. military bases alongside the places people were forced to leave behind. In one project, a floating town installation, Chung models how communities might live with chronic flooding rather than relocate, reframing displacement as something that can, in some cases, be addressed through adaptation. Documentation of the work, including photos of her “floating village” installation and five individual houseboat models, was presented by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction alongside its 2024 Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference, extending the project into policy discussions. Other works operate through juxtaposition. A large-scale mapping project aligns the global footprint of carbon dioxide emissions with patterns of displacement, placing environmental impact and human movement side by side. The pairing prompts debate, including questions from government officials encountering the work. “We cannot separate things from one to another,” Chung says, describing the “entanglement” of social, political, economic and environmental processes. Her projects also create space for dialogue. As part of the Vietnam Exodus Project in Hong Kong, Chung organized and moderated panel discussions bringing together human rights lawyers, former refugees and advocacy organizations to address asylum policy alongside lived experience.

READING THE MAP

For scholars like Heidi Amin-Hong, an assistant professor of English at UCSB who contributed to the exhibition catalog, this layering is central to Chung’s work. “She’s able to bring together an incredible range of archival material,” Amin-Hong says. “But she also invites viewers to participate in interpreting it.” In her classes on race, refuge and migration, Amin-Hong brings students to see the exhibition. Many are struck by how Chung’s maps move between global scale and personal recognition. “One student saw a place on the map that her father told stories about in Guatemala,” Amin-Hong says. “Another student who served in the military recognized a tiny base where he had been stationed.”

Those moments, she says, reveal how mapping can surface histories that remain hidden in official records. “At the core, these works are about telling stories that are usually missing from statistical or geopolitical narratives.”

MIGRATION BEYOND THE HUMAN

While many of Chung’s works focus on refugees and forced migration, her research extends far beyond human movement. She traces the spread of spices along ancient trade routes. She studies archaeobotanical evidence of grains and crops traveling across continents. She maps Neolithic earthworks in Southeast Asia and Europe — traces of early human settlements that reshape landscapes thousands of years ago. These patterns reveal something fundamental: Migration is not a modern anomaly. “Human movements are ancient,” Chung says. “Migration has always been what we do.” Tracking these movements also reveals how deeply human activity has altered ecosystems. “The transplanting of plants from their native environments to all corners of the Earth shows the extent of human migration and our colonization of nature,” she says. “It has reshaped biodiversity in profound ways.” Through this broader lens, migration appears less as a crisis and more as a long-standing feature of life on Earth, though one increasingly intensified by climate change and geopolitical conflict. RESEARCH AS ARTISTIC PRACTICE For Chung, art and research are inseparable. Her studio practice resembles a laboratory. Tables fill with archival photographs, government reports, maps and handwritten notes. Projects evolve through conversations with historians, scientists, human rights lawyers and former refugees, some of whom participate as local collaborators.

FROM MEMORY TO HISTORY

Although much of Chung’s work addresses refugee histories, she rarely centers her own story directly. Born in Vietnam, she fled with her family after the war and later studied in the U.S., earning her MFA from UCSB’s Department of Art in 2000. The exhibition marks a kind of homecoming. Kim Yasuda, professor emerita of art at UCSB and one of Chung’s mentors during graduate school, remembers her as an artist deeply engaged with questions of displacement and belonging. “We connected around experiences of loss, absence and migration,” Yasuda says. “But the challenge was always: How do you create work that resonates beyond your own story?” Over time, Yasuda says, Chung expanded those questions outward from personal memory to global histories. “What she has done is extraordinary,” Yasuda says. “She found a way to connect individual stories to larger systems — environmental, political, historical.”

THINKING IN DEEP TIME

A more recent turn in Chung’s work emerged from encounters with geological time. While researching an early Permian forest buried beneath the city of Chemnitz, Germany, and later visiting the petrified forests of Arizona’s Triassic Chinle Formation, she began to rethink the scale at which history unfolds. “The most recent shift in my work is realizing how microscopic human history is when placed within the vast stretch of Earth’s deep time,” Chung says. Fossilized forests and geological strata record climate events that occurred millions of years ago. Seen against that timeline, modern political borders and human conflicts begin to look fleeting. That sense of scale informs Chung’s immersive installation “Spheres of Time,” currently screening at UCSB’s AlloSphere, which combines 360-degree moving image and sound to situate human activity within planetary history. For Chung, these encounters are both humbling and clarifying. They suggest that while human histories are fragile and easily erased, they are also part of a much larger continuum of change.

MAPPING CARE

Despite the immense scope of her work, Chung often returns to small acts of attention. Throughout her career, she has drawn inspiration from filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea of “speaking nearby” rather than speaking for others. “It’s important to recognize the distance between someone’s lived experience and someone observing it,” Chung says. “Empathy is not the same as understanding.” That awareness shapes how she approaches storytelling. “When we choose not to listen to someone’s story, it doesn’t make them voiceless,” she says. “We only need to listen.” Bringing together decades of research and reflection, “Tiffany Chung: indelible traces” offers a body of work that refuses simple conclusions. Through maps, archives and careful acts of reconstruction, it invites viewers to reconsider how histories are made — and how small they appear against the vast timeline of the Earth.