Please join us for the spring 2025 Distinguished Lecture in Asian Art in Honor of the Lijin Collection, featuring Tiffany Sia in a discussion with Stanford faculty members Pavle Levi and Gordon Chang. They will discuss her practice at large and the works in the single-gallery exhibition No Place, Sia’s first solo presentation in a museum, on view at the Cantor from April 9–August 29, 2025. RSVP here.

No Place presents two landscape films which relate a story of exile, the escape of the artist’s family from Cold War-era Shanghai to Hong Kong under the guise of vacation. These twin works counter documentary reenactment to vivify what Sia’s refers to as “no place,” locales made spectral through violence and forgetting, “whose specificities are blurred by invasion and hostility.”

In A Child Already Knows, a short film recounted as if from the perspective of Sia’s father as a young child of nine, the most sensational details of the story are kept just outside of the child’s awareness. Between the images—clips drawn from early Mao-era cartoons, intertitles, and newsreel—the work recreates a necessarily fragmented and flickering memory.

The three-channel video Journey From North to South (2024) traces a road trip that begins in New York and ends in Biloxi, Mississippi, attempting a reenactment of a southward exile using another landscape as proxy. The camera barely rests, capturing a 22-hour duration of highways spanning night and day.

Sia shares with film and media scholar Pavle Levi an interest in the possibility of Cinema by Other Means, especially in its consideration of the importance of the interstitial and elliptical in creating meaning. An expert in America-Chinese relations and the Chinese diaspora, Historian Gordon H. Chang offered the term No Place in a 2022 conversation with Sia about her own family’s exilic experience.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker and writer who was born in Hong Kong and currently lives and works in New York. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight and elsewhere. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Maxwell Graham, New York and Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna. This year she published her first collection of essays On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024).

All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free! Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for seating.

We gratefully acknowledge support from The Distinguished Lecture in Asian Art Fund in Honor of the Lijin Collection.

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Parking

Free visitor parking is available along Lomita Drive as well as on the first floor of the Roth Way Garage Structure, located at the corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way at 345 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305. From the Palo Alto Caltrain station, the Cantor Arts Center is about a 20-minute walk or the free Marguerite shuttle will bring you to campus via the Y or X lines.

Disability parking is located along Lomita Drive near the main entrance of the Cantor Arts Center. Additional disability parking is located on Museum Way and in Parking Structure 1 (Roth Way & Campus Drive). Please click here to view the disability parking and access points.

Accessibility Information or Requests

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is committed to ensuring our programs are accessible to everyone. To request access information and/or accommodations for this event, please complete this form at least one week prior to the event: museum.stanford.edu/access.

For questions, please contact disability.access@stanford.edu or Kwang-Mi Ro, kwangmi8@stanford.edu, (650) 723-3469.

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Image: Tiffany Sia, A Child Already Knows, 2024. Video, 33 min. Courtesy the artist and Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna;  and Maxwell Graham, New York