Transferring geodata onto scales, grids, and maps, modern cartography became a biopolitical tool to regulate how human beings organize society, demar­cate borders and linkages, and understand and navigate space. In her cartographic works, Tiffany Chung examines the uneven terrains of power structures, subjugation, and displacement by creating alternative maps for memories and lived experiences that are personal, peripheral, and repressed. In Reconstructing an Exodus History: Flight Routes from Camps and of ODP Cases (2017), Chung delicately constructs a large-scale embroidered map, documenting the journeys of Vietnamese refugees displaced by the Vietnam War across the globe. The artist’s intimate and laborious gestures that suture the rigidity of modern mapmaking, and the malleability of textile-making, remap our histories and realities, centring humans beyond mere data. In Tirailleurs, Worker-Soldiers, ‘Comfort Women’: Sea Voyages, Global Movements, Disremembered Histories of WWII (2026), a new commission for the exhibition, Chung traces the trajectories of colonial troops and the female-labour displacement under colonial powers during the Second World War through multicolour embroidery. From the African Askari employed by multiple European forces, the Nepalis, and Northern Indian Gurkhas that served in the British Army, to the forced labour in East Asia under Japanese imperialism, Chung’s textile map zooms into the different lives and traces that narrate alternative stories of colonial violence and European liberation in the twentieth century. 

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Tiffany Chung and HKW, 2026

Work in the exhibition: Tirailleurs, Worker-Soldiers, ‘Comfort Women’: Sea Voyages, Global Movements, Disremembered Histories of WWII (2026), embroidery on fabric, 140 × 380 cm (legend piece: 50 × 84 cm). Courtesy of the artist