PRESENTATION: Sung Tieu-Without Full Disclosure

Sung Tieu creates minimalist environments, working with various media such as installation, sculpture, video, photography, drawing, text and sound. Documents, found objects and memorabilia, even down to the interiors of public offices play a key role. Her works are based on extensive research and are conceived in relation to the exhibition venue’s immediate surroundings and in collaboration with several contributors.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen Archive

Sung Tieu’s installations often combine documentary and fictional elements, being characterised by a simple formal language enabling the objects themselves to speak. The exhibition “Without Full Disclosure” across eleven rooms at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen brings together over 50 works from the last seven years, some of which are being shown in Germany for the first time. It provides an overview of artistic strategies and themes such as the influence of French colonisation on cultural standards in Vietnam and beyond, the use of psychological and acoustic weapons in military operations, and the development of energy infrastructures. The Siegen exhibition will also focus on new works that expand on her current study of the risks inherent in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the USA to include German research into shale gas extraction and potential sites for this already identified in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. Sung Tieu has earned a reputation for works that reflect her own migration experience after the fall of the wall. Born in Vietnam, the artist followed her father, who was working as a contract labourer in the GDR, to a reunified Germany at the age of five. Against this background, her art deals with questions of social responsibility and the impact of bureaucratic power structures and social control. She also examines the global implications of colonialism and the Cold War. The artist concerns herself with the ideological, economic and socio-political structures that determine our coexistence and are manifest in standardisation, measurability and quantifiability. She is interested in the information concealed behind seemingly transparent processes, open data, political news, and everyday objects. The focus is on critical infrastructures determining who and what will become visible. Since 2016, Tieu has been engaged in a critical examination of psychological and bureaucratic warfare — their histories and effects—to uncover the socio-political and ideological mechanisms undergirding geo-political agendas. This interest resulted in video and sound installations such as “In Cold Print” (2020), “Song for Unattended Items” (2018) and “Remote Viewing” (2017). In these works, Tieu proposes that the legacy of a Cold War threat continues to propagate—that there is a persistent state of mitigated catastrophe dispersed within and contaminating our everyday realities, the alleviation of which is premised on differentiating signal from noise and the benign from the malignant. In installations such as Zugzwang (2020) and What is your |x|? (2020), and her series Newspapers 1969 – ongoing (2017 – ongoing), Tieu examines the culture of information and its institutionalised dynamics of transmission in our societies—whether through newspaper columns or astrological interpretations.

Photo: Sung Tieu, Mural for America, 2023, Courtesy the artist, Emalin, London, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Galerie Trautwein Herleth, Berlin, Photo: New Document

Info: Curator: Thomas Thiel, Assistant Curator: Jessica Schiefer, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Unteres Schloss 1, Siegen, Germany, Duration: 30/6-10/11/2024, Daus & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.mgksiegen.de/