Sung Tieu has a studio in a leafy courtyard in Berlin’s Wedding district, where an assistant is busy scrubbing old coins in a bowl with baking soda and water. The shipment of coins got stuck in customs in Vietnam, so the artist had to travel there and take the parcel to Berlin herself. Most of the coins have a hole in the middle, and they date back to the time when Indochina was under French colonial rule. They would later be part of her show “Perfect Standard” at Trautwein Herleth, the gallery formerly known as Barbara Weiss.
Tieu’s installations often incorporate everyday objects, like those coins, in sterile environments, yet they are full of elements that could accommodate humans. A case in point: Zugzwang (2020) at Haus der Kunst in Munich. The show resembled an office space with filing cabinets stocked with trinkets such as a piggy bank and a cartoon shark-shaped coffee mug, a desk, and an ergonomic chair, all in black. The pieces seemed abandoned in the lofty exhibition space. Tieu is renowned for installations that speak to an unease with administrational processes.
A sound piece is part of the installation in Munich. Pens scratched on paper at a speed that seemed hardly conducive to any task; footsteps echoed in a long hallway, and there was nervous typing on a keyboard, followed by the listlessly pulsating buzz of a photocopy machine. Clocks ticked, landline phones chimed, and the symphony of noise eventually blended with a funeral march-like music: a tired rendition of the overture from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Tieu’s sound piece is a sonata of bureaucracy that lacks the zany gaiety of Erik Satie’s Sonatine bureaucratique from 1917. It played everywhere at once from concealed speakers.
The walls were lined with printouts, which the artist adapted from application forms for asylum seekers. “I opted to fictionalize them,” she tells me at her studio in Berlin. “I altered the text of the documents to unveil the underlying criteria and biases inherent in the asylum process.” The forms now ask for health, religious, or political risks, or for the applicants’ financial situation, and thereby they reveal the underlying prejudices.
Improbably, such cynical bureaucratic language implies something even more cynical. Risk assessment and risk control are terms that evoke a discourse that economizes all of human existence. People figure as bearers of profits and hazards. In the background of the sheets were drawings of chess problems, alluding to the exhibition’s title. Zugzwang, in German, denotes the obligation to make a move in a turn-based game, even if it is to the player’s disadvantage — a predicament asylum seekers often face when filling out these forms.
Sung Tieu, who was born in Vietnam in 1987 and came to Germany in 1992, engages with progressive abstraction. The forms she exhibited in Munich were abstractions of human lives, and, in a later show, “Civic Floor” (2022–23) at Mudam, the artist stripped them further. Tieu removed all writing from the forms, and only lines and boxes remained. Then she took away the remaining graphics and quantified the forms: How much space do the bars, blocks, boxes, and cells cover? The terms used to describe the documents recall prison topography, like a Foucauldian nightmare, in which penal architecture, power, and control are inseparable.
“I wanted to understand how squares and boxes, these mundane elements, orchestrate you as a person, one’s identity and existence within societal structures,” she says. Her pieces are not empty musings on the nature of administration, however. They refer to genuine obstacles people still have to pass.
For Vietnamese contract workers in Socialist East Germany, navigating immigration was only the first hurdle. “My interest in bureaucracy became very apparent when I started working with the history of Vietnamese worker’s labor recruitment in the GDR,” says Tieu. Her focus shifted to how the GDR administration quantified aspects of everyday life. All manufacturing companies were state owned, so-called Volkseigene Betriebe, and almost seven million of sixteen million GDR citizens worked in such enterprises. When, in 1990, those suppliers were hurriedly privatized and often flogged off to the lowest bidder, many people lost their jobs. The crash landing in capitalism resulted in stark economic inequality between East and West.
In her research, Tieu came upon a set of documents for Kahla Ceramics, a VEB for which every workplace task for Vietnamese contract workers had been categorized: gluing the handle to the cup; decorating the cup. Each step was allotted a time span, and an hourly pay was assigned, all documented and quantified. Tieu: “I became interested in trying to measure and quantify these bureaucratic documents themselves.” Her exhibitions around that subject — such as “Multiboy” at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig (2021) — became “an exercise in understanding bureaucracy and its mechanisms that underpin administrative structures.”
Tieu’s explorations of bureaucracy are carefully executed. The spaces are sparse and sober, and the metal pieces are austere. But many, like the stainless-steel seating units in her show at Haus der Kunst, which show no bolts, screws, or welding seams, were not produced in a foundry specializing in sculpture but by a company that provides furniture for maximum security prisons, as if the design choices denoting “Minimalist sculpture” in the art context translate into utilitarian features outside of it.
We are quick to resort to Minimalism if a body of work uses simple forms and shiny, cold materials that do not invite touch — as if it were a descriptive category for sparse artworks that use few means and dabble in industrial-seeming surfaces. But Tieu is consciously referring to Minimalism. On the one hand, she is drawn to it. She asserts her interest in conceptual art, and Minimalism is a part of that. Tieu, who studied in Hamburg and London, does not use the term lightly: “I concurrently harbor a critical stance towards it. I view Minimalism as emblematic of a broader cultural imperialism, particularly rooted in American hegemony within the art world.”
Her installation In Cold Print (2020) at Nottingham Contemporary divided the exhibition space into vertical compartments by slotting steel fences between concrete pillars, directing and interrupting the movement of viewers through space. It set out to show the distant resemblance between Minimalism, the art movement, and design that dehumanizes or is outright linked to war. The US Air Force used perforated steel mats — Marston mats, named after the place in North Carolina where they were first used — to allow helicopters and other aircraft to land on ground soaked by monsoon rains. After troops pulled out of Vietnam, many of the mats were salvaged. Some were reused to build the US-Mexican border wall in the 1990s. The Vietnam War remains visible in the border wall — a site that carries its own violence — like an involuntary monument.
“I discussed the relation between those and the drawings by Sol LeWitt,” Tieu tells me. To this day, LeWitt’s drawings are executed by assistants in institutions worldwide. But when we occupy ourselves with lines, color, and composition, says Tieu, “we don’t talk about the political condition of such a work of art and the way these works are able to travel and smoothly transition between contexts.” Like the Minimalists, she is interested in horizontality and verticality; only in this case vertical serves as protection and horizontal as invasion.
Tieu’s exhibition “Parkstück,” shown in 2019 at Fragile, a project space in Berlin, was austere too, and a feeling of liminality pervaded. The title recalls Gerhard Richter’s sinister yet idyllic “Parkstück” paintings from the early 1970s, and the show itself uses polished, dull-edged seating elements familiar from Tieu’s other pieces, except these are made for public parks. People can’t leave traces, or so it seems, and the cold surfaces exude a subdued brutality. A printout of a newspaper article, jammed under a cardboard box, relates a brawl among parents on a playground. The note allows violence to enter, like a signal from outside this self-contained exhibition.
The sound piece accompanying the show featured traffic noises, distant airplanes, and droning music. As if to interfere with any straightforward interpretation, Tieu’s exhibitions almost always include an auditory component. “The way I work with sound is vastly different from the way I work visually. I’m much more rigorous and tough on myself regarding the way the works come together on a visual level,” she says. “I convey a certain feeling or mood that I have with the work, and I don’t try to describe it too much.” In the case of “Parkstück,” the sound creates a scene. It enlivens the cold, inanimate objects.
The soundtrack doesn’t always consist of field recordings, though. At times, it involves abstract soundscapes or, like in Zugzwang, something more narrative. Other sound pieces — like the one for “Loveless,” shown in 2019 at Piper Keys, a nonprofit gallery in London, which, similarly to “Parkstück,” staged steel tables and cardboard lunch boxes — retrieve fragments of pop songs, such as the piano intro of Kanye West’s 2010 track “Runaway.” Often, rustling, buzzing, and scraping sounds, which are irreducible, like TV static, make it challenging to tell signals from noise.
Transmission as a motif dovetails with her fascination with psychological operations, sound weapons, and other means of psychological warfare. Tieu discovered a US operation for which the army created a tape of the purported spirits of deceased Vietnamese soldiers to play on the battlefield and thereby demoralize the opponent: spirituality as a weapon. Later, Tieu came across the so-called Havana Syndrome, an alleged sonic assault on US diplomats in Cuba, which created nausea and headaches in the victims. The artist subjected herself to a recreation of the attack during which her brain waves were recorded. Then, she translated the recording into a sound piece alternating harsh static with synth chords, played as part of “In Cold Print.” The visual persists until it disappears, wrote the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, while the sonorous fades away into permanence.
Lately, Tieu’s work has changed. “I find myself uninterested in the notion of grand artistic gestures, as in the ‘genius move of an artist’s hand,’” she says. But recently, she became interested in chaos, the opposite of control. That interest surfaces in her work about how the Vietnamese subverted the alcohol monopoly imposed by French colonial rule. In the nineteenth century, French entrepreneurs effectively held a monopoly on Vietnam’s liquor market due to taxes and regulations that banned domestic rice wine production, replacing traditional liquors with inferior French imports. However, the Vietnamese started relying on clandestine distribution methods via hidden compartments in baskets, concealed wineskins strapped to women’s stomachs, and inside bread loaves. Chaos figured as a means to eschew control and regain agency. For her 2023 show “The Ruling” at Ordet in Milan, Tieu injected loaves of bread with alcohol — Yeast and Spirits (2023) — and placed them in a seemingly random arrangement on the gallery floor. This formal decision already is a departure from the tightly controlled installations, and the material, too, is unexpected, considering the pristine surfaces of older works.
For the same show in Milan, Tieu recreated five wooden rulers with ancient measurements, each titled The Ruling, each with subtitles like Direct Taxes per Inhabitants, or Investment and Profits (2023). When the governor general of French Indochina, Paul Doumer, decreed in 1897 the traditional measuring unit — the xích — to be reduced by seven centimeters, it was to standardize measurements in the colony. That move affected taxation too: more tax for the same area of land.
Simultaneously with Doumer’s decree, in the 1890s, the Lumière brothers screened their first cinematic experiments. One of their assistants, Gabriel Veyre, traveled to Hanoi, where he filmed — among other things — Doumer’s wife throwing worthless coins to children. The film, titled Enfants annamites ramassant des sapèques devant la Pagode des Dames, shot in 1899, was screened at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 as a display of prosperity and generosity.
Tieu printed individual frames of the film on two steel panels, titled The Opposite of Good is Good Intentions (Second One) and The Opposite of Good is Good Intentions (Second Two) (2024). From there, coins are sunk into rubber tiles as if tossed carelessly. The piece Anti-Trauma Walk (2024) is laid around the exhibition space like a U-shaped catwalk.
An abstract sound piece plays — Wind’s Return (2024) — which may or may not include the sound of coins. And while this installation may be even more severe and abstract than her others, it is made for human presence. “I’ve always been captivated by how the body moves through space.” What the audience see first, what they think about, which sound they hear, how they move in space: “In that way, the body is very present, just not its representation,” says the artist.
The semantic density of her work dispels thoughts of Minimalism. But is it political? “The labeling of political art — if life was so easy. Abstraction slips that conversation; that’s why I find it interesting,” says the artist. I’m reminded of something Roland Barthes wrote at the end of his 1957 essay collection Mythologies. To Barthes, there were two ways of thinking about art. One is “to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize,” and the other is to “posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and […] poetize.” Tieu’s installations appear impenetrable. They seem like a poeticization of administration, making it untranslatable to any purpose. But her work straddles this line. It is rooted in history, and there is an analytical impulse at its core. If her work is illegible, it is so because the world it references is too.
