Tiffany Sia (1988, Hong Kong), winner of the Baloise Art Prize 2024, explores the material properties of film and their impact on the narratives and perception of space. In her film The Sojourn (2023), recently donated to the Mudam Collection, she travels to Taiwan to follow in the footsteps of martial arts film director King Hu (1931–97). As Sia argues in her book On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (2024), Hu in his iconic films ‘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’ and displaced in the misty mountain of Taiwan, the location of many of his films. In The Sojourn, Sia collects the impressions of Shih Chun (1935), the lead actor in Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967). Chun recalls how the fog affected the way the image was rendered against the backdrop of the Hehuanshan mountains in Dragon Inn. In Sia’s work, visual meditation is infused with subtle discrepancies: images are projected onto a distorting medium, evocative of the slippery experience of exilic memory.

Biography

Tiffany Sia (1988, Hong Kong) has had solo exhibitions at ajh.pm, Bielefeld (2023) and at Artists Space, New York (2021). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2023); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023); the Seoul Museum of Art (2022) and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2022). Her films have been screened at festivals such as MoMA Doc Fortnight (2024 and 2021), Open City Documentary Festival, London (2024); TIFF Toronto International Film Festival (2024); New York Film Festival (2022 and 2021) and Flaherty Film Seminar, Hamilton (2022). She received the Baloise Art Prize in 2024 and the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award in 2022. She is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024). Tiffany Sia lives& and works in New York.