Research as strategy: resisting historical oblivion in Tiffany Chung’s The Vietnam Exodus Project

Vietnamese artist Tiffany Chung defines herself both as an artist and as a researcher. This article examines Chung’s innovative and complex integration of scholarly research with artistic practice in The Vietnam Exodus Project. Begun in 2009, the project involves an on-going assemblage of cartographic works, archival materials, collaborative paintings and texts relating to the massive flux of refugees fleeing Vietnam from the 1970s, known popularly in the West as ‘the boat people’. Chung’s research-based practice is analysed here as a strategy to ground her artistic practice in the real and to give her work both legitimacy and value. The attitude of denial shown by Vietnamese authorities vis-à-vis the boat people’s exodus is the ultimate ground from which this artistic venture has grown.