A new show at Two Temple Place, London addresses the visible and invisible boundaries that continue to shape our experience of the world

The first piece that one encounters in State-less, a cogent exhibition of moving image and photographic works by East and Southeast Asian artists, is a video by the Vietnamese-American artist Tiffany Chung, best known for her intricate cartographic embroideries and drawings of various geopolitical conflict zones, often reticulated by meandering lines that index the migratory pathways of displaced populations. km 0 – Son’s Story (2017) chronicles the harrowing journey of Son, one of an estimated 45,000 refugees from the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979, who was only granted asylum in Hong Kong two decades later. Eschewing the granular abstraction of her signature topographies, Chung instead uses a series of Google Map animations, visually rendering Son’s sobering account of perilous boat crossings, deportations and detention with a clean utilitarianism and efficacy that starkly contrasts the innumerable obstacles – geographical, bureaucratic, legal and cultural – that Son and so many others have been forced to navigate in order to be granted the right to remain.

While Chung’s video offers a topical point of departure for the exhibition (State-less happened to open the week UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his government’s plan to discourage illegal Channel crossings), other works speak to different concerns, the 12 artworks demonstrating the myriad ways East and Southeast Asian artists ‘respond, contemplate, observe and react to the environment they are in’. Curator Ling Tan, of the East and Southeast Asian art collective Kakilang and a trained architect, breaks up the exhibition with a latticework of exposed scaffolding, referencing the ever-changing urban environment of cities in East and Southeast Asia that many of the works address, while also undoing and unsettling the stately grandeur of the site.

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