​BIOGRAPHY

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker and writer who lives and works in New York. She has directed several short films, including Never Rest/Unrest (2020), Do Not Circulate (2021), What Rules the Invisible (2022), The Sojourn (2023), and A Child Already Knows (2024). These films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, the Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. Tiffany has had solo gallery exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Italy; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Ireland and elsewhere.
 
Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October and LUX Moving Image. Inpatient Press published her chapbook Salty Wet in 2019, and its artist book sequel Too Salty Too Wet was published by Speculative Place in 2020. Her first collection of essays On and Off-Screen Imaginaries was published by Primary Information in 2024. 
 
In 2022, Sia was the recipient of the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award and in 2024, was awarded the Baloise Art Prize.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2025
TIFFANY SIA

PROGRAM ONE: Monday, February 24th - 7pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

Never Rest/Unrest (2020)
Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist's practice of scaling oral history, utilizing the vertical 16:9 aspect ratio as a vernacular form. Never Rest/Unrest takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa's "Imperfect Cinema" on the potential for filmmaking that aims towards an urgent, process-driven cinema. Dominant narratives of crisis pushed by news journalism are resisted. Instead, crisis poses ambiguous, anachronistic and often banal time. Subtitles are intentionally omitted as a means of interrogating the cultural proximity or distance of the viewer from Hong Kong.
 
Don Not Circulate (2021)
Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips footage that challenges the materiality, ownership and legal boundaries of documentation.
 
This film contains footage, descriptions and acts that may constitute criminal offenses under prevailing laws. The following offense-related material is meant for documentary purposes only. All rights reserved to respective copyright owners. The archival footage spans a single news event in Hong Kong, weaving a violent timeline in roughly the order that the materials were published online, including anonymously uploaded videos from Twitter and internet forums, allegedly leaked audio and news reportage––much of which has since been erased, disavowed or forgotten. A digital media trail teeters between the seeable and unseeable, deception and truth, conjuring ghosts and occult forces on the timeline.
 
What Rules the Invisible (2022)
What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upends archival travelog footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows tropes and patterns. The same shots repeat across decades, from landscape to cityscape to street scenes. Sometimes the footage reveals more about the traveler himself, such as a sequence where the camera curiously tracks the hips and bare legs of women wearing cheongsam crossing a busy intersection. Sia’s essay film studies these travelogs to find indignant subjects glaring back at the camera, or figures on the edges of the frame who appear pixelated and phantasmic, showing the patina of the footage’s circulation. Meanwhile, intertitles intermittently puncture this footage with an oral history of Hong Kong, as told by Sia’s mother who describes colonial police, excrement and hauntings in Kowloon of the postwar era. The viewer is left to imagine these scenes there are no images for.


PROGRAM TWO: Tuesday, February 25th - 7pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

The Sojourn (2023)
Directed by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia, The Sojourn imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic landscapes where Dragon Inn was shot. He counsels on the perfect conditions of mist and weather. Yet, in the journey through the mountains of Dayuling, the sublime landscape of King Hu remains ever elusive. She later visits the elementary school of Indigenous filmmaker and principal Pilin Yapu of the Atayal tribe. Absent of conventional subtitles, the essay film employs text burned into the center of the frame as a mode of translation, sometimes refusing total disclosure.

A Child Already Knows (2024)
A Child Already Knows is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same era. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make and made impossible in a place of no return. While children’s stories often expound a moral tale, A Child Already Knows presents a child as protagonist caught in complex and ambiguous retelling. Such scenes of Shanghai during the Cold War are harder to pin down, sometimes unsettling. The child becomes increasingly aware of the world of adult secrets. A television is flickering. Train sounds whir.​