Tiffany Sia: Slippery When Wet

Slippery When Wet

Tiffany Sia 

A morning hike through the lush scenery of Hong Kong’s Lamma Island appeared on my phone screen as I rode the subway toward New York City’s Chinatown. Broadcast online, A Road Movie Is Impossible in Hong Kong (2021) was timed to coincide with sunrise in Hong Kong every day for one week as part of Tiffany Sia’s solo show at Artists Space. The faint chirping of birds emanated from my earbuds as I observed the artist approach a mountaintop clearing in real time.

Evening had fallen by the time I surfaced in Manhattan. I watched the remainder of the livestream inside the gallery as a wall projection. The daily screenings formed a connective thread between Sia’s hometown and New York, where she divides her time. The artist’s transient place within the Chinese diaspora parallels Hong Kong’s ongoing cultural and political crisis, which she attempts to unpack in “Slippery When Wet.” Sia grounds her exploration in collecting pieces of the past through archival video and documenting the present on paper and on screen.

Across mediums, wetness recurs as a motif, most notably as an element of weather. Stacked vintage television sets play Hong Kong weather updates from the 1980s and ’90s. Delivered in Cantonese and British-accented English, the reports include typhoon warnings accompanied by charmingly dated cartoon graphics and ads for luxury watches. To simulate Hong Kong’s humidity, a semi-opaque film was adhered to the gallery windows to make them appear fogged with condensation. The deliberate obfuscation alludes to the lack of transparency surrounding the Hong Kong government, which remains a complaint of the region’s pro-democracy movement.

A testament to the “slippery” nature of the protests, The Bastard Scroll (2020) functions as both material artifact and narrative account. Printed on continuous sheets of paper with perforated edges, the text, entitled Too Salty Too Wet, provides an analogue representation of the digital “doomscrolling” so many of us have become accustomed to in our consumption of the news. Yet, Sia avoids ascribing any journalistic reportage to the reflections on her experiences alongside frontline activists, stating on the opening page, “I cannot confirm or deny this as a work of fiction.” The careful language is part deflection: copies of the text have been reproduced as a book covered in mylar, a reflective material used by protestors to make themselves harder to film. But more concerning, as Sia writes, is how her words may be read or misread by an American audience prone to fetishizing “conflict narratives” in Asia. This proclivity for self-reflexiveness may explain her interest in emphasizing the work’s object-ness—in the exhibition, the scroll spread across a long wooden table and chair. At the gallery entrance, another scroll of blank printer paper hung from upper to lower level. By stripping the work of legitimacy, Sia transforms it into something more mutable, and perhaps more telling.

The tension between the impulse to document and the ubiquity of surveillance tools underlies Sia’s film Never Rest/Unrest (2020), which simultaneously premiered in North America at the Museum of Modern Art. The experimental short splices together protest footage filmed using a camera phone with other “found” moments, such as a curious microaggression inflicted on Bruce Lee’s character in an old movie. Sia frequently captures other individuals recording the protests, and those watching on their devices or on monitors in public settings. A promotional video proclaiming Hong Kong to be the “World’s Freest Economy” echoes ironically later when we see the artist’s feet walking over pavement spray-painted with a call to “Free Hong Kong.” Archival video from the 1997 handover ceremony, the only part of the film not formatted to fit a smartphone screen, offers a sobering finale as we see the Union Jack and National Flag of the People’s Republic of China displayed side by side.

Spanning Hong Kong’s colonial past to its uncertain future, Sia’s work re-envisions not only a geographical and historical place, but also where it lies in the imagination. “Slippery When Wet” acted as a warning to viewers to anticipate a messy and muddled reality—one which promised no definitive answers.

MIMI WONG