OVERVIEW

Tiffany Sia

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2022

1988

China

FELIX GAUDLITZ

Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscapes, 2022, Installation view, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna
Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscapes, 2022, Installation view, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna

Tiffany Sia’s solo exhibition Minor Landscapes at FELIX GAUDLITZ features works that interrogate the haptics of screen and print in the ordinary and extraordinary appearances of landscape as image. Exploring mediums and hybrid forms across film/video, photography, and readymade sculpture, Sia engages 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.


As the show draws a reflection on “minor landscapes,” Sia implicitly constructs a counter to a national cannon of “major ...

  • Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscapes, 2022, Installation view, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna
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Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscape #1, 2022, Detail, Digital print mounted on acrylic, customized light box, 90 × 180 × 10 cm (35,433 × 70,866 × 3,937 in), Ed. 3 + 2 AP
Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscape #1, 2022, Detail, Digital print mounted on acrylic, customized light box, 90 × 180 × 10 cm (35,433 × 70,866 × 3,937 in), Ed. 3 + 2 AP
Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscape #2, 2022, Detail, Digital print mounted on acrylic, customized light box, 90 × 180 × 10 cm (35,433 × 70,866 × 3,937 in), Ed. 3 + 2 AP
Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscape #2, 2022, Detail, Digital print mounted on acrylic, customized light box, 90 × 180 × 10 cm (35,433 × 70,866 × 3,937 in), Ed. 3 + 2 AP

Minor Landscapes #1 and Minor Landscapes #2 are part sculptural and photographic works that show an upside-down landscape image taken in analog 35mm film, printed and shown in a lightbox. These uncanny images are digitally printed and mounted on an acrylic lightbox housed in a metal frame, which allows light to leak from the side to create a halo around its edges. A display system mirroring decor found in Chinese-American restaurants across the United States, the work plays with fantasies of landscape and the sublime circulated in commonplace settings meant to invoke culture or plac ...

  • Tiffany Sia, Minor Landscapes, 2022, Installation view, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna
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“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Marshall McLuhan once observed, “People never want to live in the present. People live in the rearview mirror because it’s safer… they’ve been there before, they feel comfortable.” A rearview mirror, suspended in space from the ceiling, is angled and adjacent to the lightbox works. Facing a window onto a courtyard of the gallery, the work features a videostream component inside the mirror, typically used as a back-up cam in a car. Sia programmed the rearview mirror to play a recorded live-stream video by the Taiw ...

  • Tiffany Sia, A Wet Finger in the Air , 2021, Installation view, Artists Space, New York
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A Wet Finger in the Air (2021), a single-channel video, assembles appropriated footage of bilingual weather reports from the 1980s through 1997-era Hong Kong TVB and Pearl broadcasting stations into a hypnotic, randomized loop that repeats every hour. While these reels may invoke a kind of nostalgia, Sia’s interest centers more on locating atmospheric and weather changes as a metaphor for the similarly unpredictable and slippery turns of history. The artist metaphorically raises a wet finger in the air to judge the invisible direction of the times.

Selected Press

CV

As an artist and filmmaker, Tiffany Sia’s (*1988 in Hong Kong, CN, lives and works in New York, USA) work begins from a process of writing, research and building from an archive of video works, audio clips and transcribed conversations that culminate in explorations on temporality, the politics and relations of media circulation and placehood.


Education

2010
Bard College, BA. Film Studies and Asian Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA

2009
Qingdao University, Intensive Language Studies Summer Program, Qingdao, China

Awards, Scholarships and ...