Originally shown at Artists Space March 14 - 20, 2021 as a durational, episodic livestreamed landscape film in the solo exhibition "Slippery When Wet."
Installation view, Closer, 2022, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf
Installation view, Scoring the Words, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022
Photos: Kim Sang Tae
Jean Baudrillard, Carissa Rodriguez, Tiffany Sia, 2025, Installation view, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna
Tiffany Sia's weeklong, episodic landscape film, “A Road Movie Is Impossible in Hong Kong” (2021), attempts to reimagine the genre of a road movie in Hong Kong as a live, and durational work. Originally presented as an episodic work each day, the piece was originally live-streamed during the first week of daylight savings time beginning at sunrise during Sia’s solo exhibition “Slippery When Wet” at Artists Space in 2021. In iterations thereafter, the work has been shown at Seoul Museum of Art and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf in 2022 as a 7-channel simultaneous video installation. Inspired by a series of personal correspondence from 2016 in published in the artist’s chapbook Salty Wet (2019) and a lecture by Hong Kong film critic and programmer Clarence Tsui at Hong Kong Baptist University, the work takes up the provocation that a road movie is impossible in Hong Kong. Tsui's lecture on the sociopolitical circumstances upon filmmaking began with a challenge that a "road movie," an American cinema trope, is not translatable to Hong Kong. Each hike begins at various points across the island. Each video affords a new view, and some repeating views, observing the regularity and repetition of sea traffic, birdsong on the island, and whirring of the wind turbine and power station. There is a voice behind the camera as it broadcasts, breathing, and the camera swings out of the way to evade filming faces of fellow hikers on the trail. People are only heard off-screen. Presented horizontally, the 7 channel video installation as shown at FELIX GAUDLITZ is meant to invoke the way one moves around viewing a landscape paper scroll in museums and institutional contexts. Viewing is walking across a long plane of shifting perspectives.
Originally presented at Artists Space, New York in 2021.
Shown also as a simultaneous 7-channel installation at:
FELIX GAUDLITZ in Vienna, Austria in 2025.
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany in 2022.
Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea in 2022.
Acha, Gabriela. "'Closer' Asks Whether True Privacy is Still Possible." Frieze, May 9, 2022.
Fajemisin, Olamiju. "'Closer' at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen" by Olamiju Fajemisin. Artforum, Critics' Picks, May 2022.
Damman, Catherine. "Lust, Caution: Catherine Damman on Tiffany Sia’s “Slippery When Wet.” Artforum, Summer Issue 2021. In print and online.
Yim, Polly. "Breathing in The Invisible: Polly Yim on Tiffany Sia at Artists Space, New York.” Texte zur Kunst, April 9, 2021.
Bovino, Emily Verla, "Slippery When Wet: Tiffany Sia's Poetry of Lived Time." Ocula, February 24, 2021.
Ling, Isabel. “Wielding Time and Text, Tiffany Sia Documents Hong Kong’s Resistance” by Isabel Ling. Hyperallergic, April 13, 2021.