‘remapping the Vietnam Exodus: refugee numbers and camp locations in Asia’ by Tiffany Chung, does as its title suggests – it attempts to re-present cartographically, the raw, hard statistical numbers of fleeing Vietnamese who left their homeland between 1979 and 1989 as political refugees after the Vietnam war to other countries across Asia. The artwork itself is a hand-drawn map of Southeast and East Asia. Each country is delicately demarcated in faint but solid lines, within which are a population of vibrant points that mark with varying intensity the regions in which the Vietnamese refugees settled. Drawn with such lightness that the dots and lines appear to be floating off the paper, the details on the map start to resemble microbial cultures under a microscope, creating juxtaposition between growing organisms and the tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees that landed on the coasts of numerous Asian countries.
