MOCA Artist Film Series: Tiffany Sia

MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.

A Child Already Knows, 2024
Video (color, sound)
33 min

Tiffany Sia will be present for a post-screening conversation with Simon Leung.

A Child Already Knows is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same era. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make and made impossible in a place of no return. While children’s stories often expound a moral tale, A Child Already Knows presents a child as protagonist caught in complex and ambiguous retelling. Such scenes of Shanghai during the Cold War are harder to pin down, sometimes unsettling. The child becomes increasingly aware of the world of adult secrets. A television is flickering. Train sounds whir.

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Sia's films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and elsewhere. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; and The Mudam, Luxembourg. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; Argo Factory: Pejman Foundation, Tehran; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and elsewhere. Sia is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024), a compendium of essays that makes a case for fugitive, exilic cinema, moving beyond national identity and the politics of place as a critical lens. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October, and more. The recipient of the Baloise Art Prize in 2024, Sia has given talks at Dia Art Foundation, Stanford University, Yale University, and has taught at Cooper Union. Sia currently lives and works in New York.

Simon Leung, who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, is a project-based artist whose foremost concern is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced.

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Anna Katz, Senior Curator with Michele Huizar, Production Coordinator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Visit here for a complete listing of the 2026 series.