TL;DR Bio

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Grounded in a writing and research practice, Sia is interested in bringing tensions through multidisciplinary forms to unsettle historiography and stubborn notions of geography and genre. Materializing across film/video, new media and printed matter, her recent work explores the politics and relations of media circulation and the discrete histories of port cities.

Sia has directed several experimental films, including Never Rest/Unrest (2020), Do Not Circulate (2021), and What Rules the Invisible (2022). Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Artists Space, New York, and FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna. Her work has also been presented at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seoul Museum of Art; and Kunstverein Düsseldorf. Sia is the author of the chapbook Salty Wet (2019) and the artist book Too Salty Too Wet (2021). Her essays have appeared in the journals Film Quarterly and October. She lives and works in New York.

Sia is pronounced SHä (as the Shanghainese 謝).

Full Bio

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She is the founder of Speculative Place, formerly an experimental, independent project space hosting residents working in film, writing and art established on Lamma Island in Hong Kong. The recipient of the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker award in 2021, Sia is adjunct teaching at Cooper Union for Spring 2022 and currently lives and works in New York City. Sia is the author of 咸濕 Salty Wet, a series of anti-travelogues on distance and desire within and without Hong Kong published in July 2019. 咸濕 Salty Wet is in the Asia Art Archive and Tai Kwun Contemporary‘s Artists’ Book Library collection and was included in group shows at Chen’s and Chinatown Soup in New York. Excerpts from 咸濕 Salty Wet were featured in Hong Kong photographer Jimi Tsang's solo show “Temporal Boundary” at Parallel Space. The publication has also been featured in Artforum (Critics' Pick), Artforum China (Critics' Pick), Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub and The Atlantic. The first volume was published in the form of a chapbook through Inpatient Press. The book-length sequel Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕 was published in January 2021 via Speculative Place Press with a launch at Printed Matter. The work has been released as text interventions in the forms of leaks, including a poster-size zine that launched at Printed Matter, a leaked center-fold at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival titled Leak as Discharge and a performance/transmission at The Lab in San Francisco. The work has been written about in Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, SF MOMA’s Open Space, Ocula, and Purple Magazine. The artist book is in various collections including the Watson Library at the Met, the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University, the Print Collection and Spencer Collection at the New York Public Library, Asia Art Archive, Bard College Library, the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere. Sia directed Never Rest/Unrest, a short experimental film that takes the form of a hand-held cinema about the relentless timeline in Hong Kong from early summer to the end of 2019. The work takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” on the potential for anti-colonial filmmaking, and presents a counter-spectacular narrative. Instead, crisis poses ambiguous, anachronistic and often banal time. Never Rest/Unrest world premiered at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival as part of a retrospective in their Propositions program and had its North American premiere at MoMA Documentary Fortnight 2021 under a special program titled, Crisis News is a Genre Film. The film has also screened at Prismatic Ground (presented by Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate), San Diego Asian Film Festival and was shown at Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich) and Chen’s [Remote] (New York). The film has been written up in Artforum, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, The Brooklyn Rail, Spike Art Magazine, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Ocula and ART PAPERS. Sia’s short Do Not Circulate, a video essay on a single media and image trail from 2019 in Hong Kong that reckons with leaks, rumor and the occult world premiered at New York Film Festival. The film has also been screened at Double Exposure Film Festival, Linea d’Ombra Festival and elsewhere. The experimental essay short has been written about in Artforum, Art-agenda, MUBI and elsewhere. Sia's latest short What Rules The Invisible screened at Toronto International Film Festival, Open City Documentary Film Festival, New York Film Festival and elsewhere. She was part of Home Cooking, a geographically-dispersed collective of artists and open-source digital platform founded by Asad Raza, on which she contributed Hell is a Timeline. The series was a weekly performance of select texts that uses reading aloud as a tool of pedagogy and care, intended to provoke a critical and materialist reckoning with our relentless digital and real timelines. The series is archived on Vimeo and made accessible as transcripts on the Home Cooking Google doc. Hell is a Timeline has been mentioned in The New York Times, South London Gallery, ArtAsiaPacific, 032c and Heichi Magazine. Sia’s first institutional solo show was exhibited at Artists Space (New York). Her work has also been shown at Kunstverein für die Rhienlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf, Germany), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea), Manchester International Festival (Manchester, UK), Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen, Norway), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, Denmark), The Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), Shedhalle (Zurich), Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, SAR), Chen’s (New York, NY), Art at a Time Like This (New York) and Chinatown Soup (New York). Her most recent solo show Minor Landscapes at FELIX GAUDLITZ (Vienna, Austria) interrogated the haptics of screen and print in the ordinary and extraordinary appearances of landscape as image. Proposing a notion of the anti-sublime, she explored mediums and hybrid forms across film/video, photography, and readymade sculpture, these works engage with each form—and its combined iterations—to make alternative paths to encounter the sublime, drawing a sense of disorientation and unease towards the genre, towards an anti-sublime. Additional works shown at LISTE in 2022 presented by FELIX GAUDLITZ, elaborated on themes of the anti-sublime with a debut of a series of video works, "Scroll Figure #1-4," in the form of a teleprompter, glazed over with a securtiy film that prevents the viewers from looking at the screens any other way than straight on. Texts unfurl on time-telling, image capture, cities bloated with mirrors and the sublime of waterfalls. Sia has spoken at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), Stanford University (Stanford, CA), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Tai Kwun Contemporary Art (Hong Kong), Hong Kong University (Hong Kong, SAR), Hong Kong Baptist University (Hong Kong, SAR), Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), Cooper Union (New York, NY), Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School (New York, NY), Parsons School of Design (New York, NY), Film Comment (New York, NY), Triple Canopy (New York, NY), Light Industry (New York, NY), The Lab (San Francisco, CA), Printed Matter (New York, NY), Asian American Writers Workshop (New York, NY), Studio Voltaire (London, UK), Screen Slate (New York, NY) and soft/WALL/studs (Singapore). Her writing has been published in Film Quarterly, October, LUX Moving Image and Screen Slate. Conversations have been published by Light Industry, Protocinema and Triple Canopy. Sia's films and video works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and elsewhere. Grounded in a writing and research practice, Sia is interested in bringing tensions through multidisciplinary forms to unsettle stubborn notions of geography, genre and time across film/video and print. Her recent work explores the politics and relations of media circulation and the discrete histories of port cities. She graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College and has been the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays scholarship. Sia is pronounced SHä (as the Shanghainese 謝).

Photo by Johnny Le.