One to Watch: Sung Tieu
By Chloe Chu
SUNG TIEU, Moving Target Shadow Detection, 2021, still from HD animation and sound: 18 min 13 sec. Courtesy the artist; Emalin, London; and Sfeir-Semler Hamburg/Beirut.
The multimedia works of Sung Tieu bring viewers face-to-face with the forces that insidiously condition our lives, making specific and articulable that which is often structurally dispersed, anonymous, fatalistic in appearance, or evasive. Her past interrogations have homed in on factors such as spiritual beliefs, including astrological principles, as well as state policies and their bureaucratic manifestations. Building on these investigations and her own biography, in 2021, the Hi Dng-born, Berlin-based artist presented a series of installations that shed light on what shaped the lives of Vietnamese workers—including her father—who were brought to state-owned factories in the German Democratic Republic under a 1980 recruitment agreement with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
