Tiffany Sia

Journalists and historians are essential agents in telling our current and past events, but it is seeing films and reading that demonstrate the very necessity for artists to show our times, too: The political artist; the affect stenographer; the oral historian; and the subversive witness. It is our necessity to look on with those who see the vision of this collective moment, during which we all happen to be alive together.

I am a multidisciplinary artist who uses text, film/video and performance as interventions around political and information literacy. As a diaspora artist currently living in Hong Kong, I am invested in working through cross-cultural frameworks to interrogate the limits of intimacy and political solidarity between systems of knowledge. I employ aesthetics of the illicit, or the unseeable—whether through face-pixelation, staging leaks, or smut––as potent sites for smuggling sensitive material intended to stage discursive, critical encounters. My practice is in an ongoing struggle of thwarting, boring and confusing detection. I take aim at binarist narratives and propaganda to strike at more scalable, affect-driven forms of storytelling and transmission. 

I believe that mutual aid is the material choreography of political critique. The Hong Kong to New York City Mask Circuit is a grassroots-led initiative born out of an attempt to correct the collapse of the PPE supply chain, brought by the trade war and exacerbated by a supply market in crisis ridden with scams and inflated prices. The mutual aid is aimed at providing a simple tool of protection during COVID-19, resisting the typically top-down NGO model of international aid, and instead forging a bottom-up, folk infrastructure run by a diaspora network of friends and collaborators between Hong Kong and New York sending masks transnationally. It is through these channels of trust that we collectively built a distribution chain, shipping masks to medical professionals. Since supplies have caught up at healthcare facilities, the circuit has focused on providing for Indigenous communities, Black Lives Matter actions and mutual aid for vulnerable communities in New York City.  

Tiffany Sia

 All images courtesy of the artist.

Tiffany Sia’s Website

For more information and to donate to the Hong Kong-to-New York Masi Circuit