Tiffany Sia: Phantasmatic Screens

“Phantasmatic Screens” by Tiffany Sia explores memory in exile through the symbolic dimension of landscape. Central to the exhibition is “The Sojourn” (2023), one of two film installations, in which the artist retraces the steps of filmmaker King Hu (1931–1997), renowned for his wuxia martial arts epics. Hu fled mainland China for Hong Kong in 1949 before relocating to Taiwan, where he reconstructed the atmosphere of his lost home through cinematic landscapes. Revisiting the filming sites of “Dragon Inn” (1967) with actor Shih Chun as her guide, Sia highlights the stark contrast between these now-urbanised locations and the sublime vistas of Hu’s cinema. Projected onto a wavy curtain, the film assumes a sculptural form, reflecting on how images construct narratives and shape collective perceptions of space while extending Sia’s ongoing exploration of the cinematic experience.

The exhibition also presents “Antipodes III” (2024), composed of found footage appropriated from a livestream of a militarised site in Kinmen, the Taiwanese island closest to China. Part of an ongoing series isolating fixed camera views of locations tied to Cold War tensions in the Pacific, the work considers how landscapes, visibly and invisibly marked by militarisation, bear the traces of conflict. Evoking haunted terrains, it suggests how memory and place are co-constituted by geopolitical struggle, echoing Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “we look at the present through a rear-view mirror.”