What separates art from data, a painting from a graph? Or lines on a map from strokes of a brush, the form of a sculpture or the space defined in an artist’s installation? Data is often perceived as being objective, whereas art is thought to be imbued with emotion, a visceral and material response to one’s environment. In recent history, the many refugee crises that have occurred—persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar, Syrians fleeing war, even the mass evacuation following the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s—have all been met with an outpouring of data and art. Yet both art and data are problematic, with statistics effectively sterilizing a moment of trauma, with art often “missing its mark.”

Tiffany Chung, whose family was part of post-1975 mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees, has returned to the ordeal to offer a new response. To do so, Chung employs data in the form of cartographic drawings. Upon these, she renders patterns, many of which are minute in scale, mapping out what appear at first glance to be dazzling stitchwork or organic microcosms akin to those found in a petri dish or under a microscope. These are superimposed upon the familiar shapes of continents and coastlines. It is only upon closer inspection that each pattern—sometimes each dot—represents a statistic that Chung has painstakingly researched, itself a recorded moment where agony or injury has occurred.

On view in Chelsea’s Tyler Rollins Fine Art were Chung’s most recent works. “Unwanted Populations” was an exhibition that highlighted not only the refugee crisis that impacted the artist’s own kin, but also more recent flashpoints, from the attacks by Boko Haram that have displaced thousands in Nigeria, to the ongoing conflict in Syria. In Mapping a Conflict Without Border: Areas of Influence in Syria and Iraq (all works 2017), we see how the constructed borders of nations are made inconsequential by the spread of the so-called Islamic State within Syria and Iraq, represented by red and black dots rendered in acrylic, ink and oil on vellum. Under the artist’s treatment, the map looks chaotic, in flux, and marked by the advance and ebb of violence, with ground held or lost by ISIS appearing as if it is still being redefined by momentary occupation.