Dallas Museum of Art’s Concourse is much more than a hallway when an artist transforms it.
“Every time we change the Concourse, the museum changes completely,” said Dr. Agustin Arteaga, the museum’s Eugene McDermott Director. “When it’s filled with art, it becomes a connector. It becomes a space for reflection.”
As the sixth iteration of the Dallas Museum of Art’s Concourse mural series, Tiffany Chung: Rise Into the Atmosphere inspires reflection on the experience of migration and war. The mural will fill the Concourse for two years, on view through August 3, 2025 and part of the museum’s free general admission.
Chung, a Vietnamese-American artist based in Houston, is known for her conceptual work and research-driven process that confronts the issues of conflict, geopolitical partitioning, spatial transformation, environmental crisis and forced migration in relation to history and cultural memory.
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Rise Into the Atmosphere creates a new narrative about places currently defined by war, upheaval and displacement based on cultural memory and personal perspectives.
“Tiffany has created an installation that provides a needed antidote to the flat and stereotypical perceptions of displaced peoples and ‘conflict zones’ propagated by mass media. Instead, she offers us a more nuanced and human-orientated perspective and reminds us of the power of music and art to bring back beauty, humanity and hope,” said Vivian Li, the museum’s The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art and curator of the exhibition.
The multisensory installation begins with what is heard. Collaborating with composer Isaac Hernández Campos, Chung created Composition X, an audio installation based on the experiences of those uprooted.
“Composition X interweaves music, sounds and spoken words created by 28 individuals from around the world with me,” Chung said. “Drawing from their memories of their home, their experience of being displaced, of starting a new life elsewhere or simply their compassion or imagination.”
Composition X was inspired by Beth Gazo, a Syriac liturgical book of Syriac hymns and melodies, and the poetry of Rumi.
“So, my work on Iraq and Syria since 2010 also led me to appreciate Rumi’s poem ‘Where Everything is Music’ while I was tracking conflict and displacement,” Chung said. “It was such an uplifting and beautiful poem that could get you through such difficult times.”
Carefully edited together, those experiences become a melody of memory.
“It was a long process of going back and forth with one draft after another. I don’t even know how many drafts I have on my computer. It’s just insane,” Chung said. “It was a very elaborate process.”
The version installed at the museum is structured in six parts, reflecting different emotional terrains. Chung used the sonic frequencies of Composition X to create the visual aspect of the installation, Poetic Landscapes Remembered.
“At the same time, I also wanted the visitors to have a sensorial experience of traversing though an evocative terrain, both familiar and unfamiliar landscapes and immerse themselves in poetic and sonic and visual possibilities in imagining people’s memories and experiences,” Chung said.
Working with media artist Mario Norton, Chung used 3D animation software to translate the sonic frequencies of Composition X into a landscape video. Carefully curated frames became printed elements for the mural.
As a visitor walks through the Concourse, Composition X accompanies Poetic Landscapes Remembered, a striking patchwork of undulating colors, textures and patterns that makes up the terrain of the lived experience of ordinary people enduring extraordinary circumstances.
With every step, the Concourse transforms into a reflection of the untold stories of resilience, wisdom and hope.
Learn more: Dallas Museum of Art
*Dallas Museum of Art is part of North Texas Giving Day. North Texas Giving Day is September 21, with early giving beginning September 1.
