Sung Tieu

b. 1987, Hai Duong, Vietnam

BiographySung Tieu’s work contends with historiography and analyses the transnational movements of both people and objects. Her practice explores the vast and evolving protection and control industries, still rooted in the logic of the Cold War, used to restrict and mould subjects in subsequently globalized capitalism. Informed by her own experience of cultural collision and displacement, her work critically investigates the art-historical legacies of late Modernism.

Using diverse artistic mediums ranging from installation, sound, video, text, sculpture, photography, performance to public interventions, her practice navigates the diasporic experiences of temporal slippage and spatial uncertainty. Within her exhibitions, a sense of dislocation is evoked through a combination of sonic, visual, and textual elements; at the same time, her extensive research on sonic weaponry and sound as medium accentuates the work, demystifying and highlighting their material mechanics. Although based in research, her exhibitions deliberately resist any singular discursive rendering, and instead give rise to layered narrative readings.

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 institutionalized dynamics of transmission in our societies—whether through newspaper columns or astrological interpretations.

Apart from her solo practice, Tieu is part of several art collectives, engaging in collaborative, non-autonomous production; among them are TROI OI, East London Cable and Asia Art Activism. (https://www.sfeir-semler.com/galleryartists/sung-tieu/biography)

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