Lijin Lectures 2024–25

The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to present the 2024–25 Lijin Lecture series, featuring two renowned artists: Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Tiffany Sia.

On November 19, 2024, join us for an artist talk by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, followed by a special screening of his film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022).

Nguyen’s film tells the story of Nguyệt, a scrapyard worker living in Quảng Trị, one of the most heavily bombed areas in Vietnam’s history. As Nguyệt transforms bomb remnants into hanging sculptures resembling those of Alexander Calder, she begins to believe she is Calder reincarnated, raising profound questions about the lasting impacts of war and the healing potential of art. The film explores how material holds memory and the possibility for reincarnation and transformation, creating space for reflection on historical trauma and artistic legacy.

Two other works by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, sculptures made with brass from artillery shells, can be seen in the exhibition Spirit House, on view at the Cantor through January 26, 2025.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores storytelling through video and sculpture, engaging inherited histories and counter-memory through research and community involvement. He re-works dominant, often colonial histories into imaginative vignettes, blending fact and fiction in poetic narratives across time and place.

Nguyen was born in 1976 in Ho Chi Minh City and emigrated to the U.S. as a refugee in 1979. He earned his BFA from the University of California, Irvine, and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Based in Ho Chi Minh City, he co-founded Sàn Art and The Propeller Group, which blends art and advertising. His accolades include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and a Creative Capital award.

On April 25, 2025, Tiffany Sia will be in discussion with Stanford faculty Pavle Levi and Gordon H. Chang about her practice 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.

No Place presents two landscape films that formally counter documentary reenactment to 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 twinned works vivify what Sia’s refers to as “no place,” locales made spectral through violence and forgetting.

In A Child Already Knows (2024), a short film recounted as if from the perspective of Sia’s father as a 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 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 Mississippi, attempting a reenactment of a southward exile using another landscape as proxy. The camera barely rests, capturing 22 hours of passing highways.

Sia shares with Levi an interest in the possibility of Cinema by Other Means, especially in its consideration of the importance of the interstitial in creating meaning. A historian of the Chinese diaspora, 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. She is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024).

All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free and open to the public. Seating is limited, and advance registration is recommended.

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