Tiffany Sia: No Place, Solo Exhibition, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
Two landscape films relate a story of exile in this single-gallery exhibition. These twinned works convey the escape of artist Tiffany Sia’s family from Cold War-era Shanghai to Hong Kong and vivify what Sia refers to as “no place,” locales made spectral through violence and forgetting.
A Child Already Knows is recounted as if from the perspective of Sia’s father as a child of nine. Between the images––clips drawn from Mao-era cartoons, intertitles, and newsreel––the work recreates a necessarily fragmented and flickering memory.
The three-channel video Journey From North to South (2024) traces a road trip that begins in New York and ends in Mississippi, attempting a reenactment of a southward exile using another landscape as proxy. The camera barely rests, capturing 22 hours of passing highways.
