Tiffany Sia Phantasmatic Screens

Tiffany Sia Phantasmatic Screens

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Tiffany Sia’s exhibition Phantasmatic Screens explores memory in exile through the symbolic dimension of landscape. In The Sojourn(2023), one of two film installations in the show, Sia retraces the steps of director King Hu (1931–1997), acclaimed for his ‘wuxia.’ martial arts epics. Hu fled mainland China for Hong Kong in 1949 following the Civil War – a pivotal moment in Chinese history during the Cold War period – later relocating to Taiwan. There, he recreated the atmosphere of his original home in cinematic fantasies set in the Taiwanese mountains. Sia reflects on how Hu ‘reconstructed his birthplace, Beijing, which he’d left as a child and could no longer return to, reflecting on an old world that resided in the recesses of memory’.

Sia revisits the filming locations of Dragon Inn (1967) with actor Shih Chun – who played the film’s protagonist – as her guide. Transformed by urbanisation, tourism and vehicular traffic, these sites now stand in stark contrast to the sublime landscapes of Hu’s cinema. Her film meditates on how, by bringing images together, narratives are constructed, conditioning our perception of space. Visual and sonic dissonances reflect the tension between remembered and actual landscapes, shaped by exile, language barriers and cultural translation.

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Omitting subtitles in some parts of the film, Sia draws attention to dialect, sound and tone –underscoring the fragmented and elusive nature of memory. Projected onto a wavy curtain, the film takes sculptural form, extending Sia’s ongoing interest in the conditions of cinematic experience, also explored in her essay collection On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (2024).

In Antipodes III (2024), Sia presents found footage of an idyllic 24-hour panorama appropriated from a live-stream of a militarised site in Kinmen, the closest Taiwanese island to China. Part of a series that isolates fixed camera views of sites central and peripheral to Cold War tensions in the Pacific, the work dwells on landscapes visibly or invisibly marked by militarised violence. These haunted terrains reveal how memory and place are co-constituted through geopolitical conflicts. In its mode of presentation, Antipodes IIIechoes media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s insight – ‘We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future’ – suggesting how the historical significance of these places continues to shape the present of the Pacific region.

Biography

Tiffany Sia (1988, Hong Kong) is a recipient of the 2024 Baloise Art Prize, awarded annually to two young artists featured in the Statements section of Art Basel. Sia is the ninth artist to join the museum’s collection since it became a partner of the prize in 2015.