Sung Tieu

SUNG TIEU (b. 1987, Hải Dương, Vietnam) is a Berlin-based artist. Raised between political systems, her work unfolds at the intersection of biography and geopolitics. Working across sculpture, found objects, photography, archival material, drawing, and scent, Tieu examines how political, economic, and administrative systems inscribe themselves onto bodies, spaces, and forms of perception—addressing their historical formation and contemporary afterlives.

Tieu’s wall sculptures consist of aluminium bars calibrated to the bodily proportions of her mother, Vũ Thị Hạnh. Drawing on Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion (1528), the works transpose a proportional system onto a singular body. Rather than fitting the body into a fixed grid, the system itself is adjusted to the body it measures, foregrounding individuation over conformity.

Two bars measuring nearly six meters occupy the center of the room, indexed to the artist’s neck and wrist circumference. The work recalls the pillory and its function as an instrument of constraint, situating acts of measurement within histories of public exposure, coercion, and punishment.

In the adjacent room, Tieu’s work For Now We See Through a Glass, Darkly translates her mother’s head into measured volume, reflecting on phrenology and cranial measurement as tools for constructing racial hierarchies under the guise of objectivity.

A series of stools, originally fabricated in stainless steel for waiting rooms in immigration and detention facilities, is remade in wood. Once instruments of indefinite waiting, they now retain the form of authority while losing operational capacity, exposing bureaucracy as a choreography of control sustained by inertia.

Sung Tieu's work Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable envelops the façade of the German Pavilion in over three million mosaic tesserae, depicting the skeletal remains of a prefabricated socialist housing block on Gehrenseestrasse in East Berlin at a 1:1 scale—the artist’s former home and one of the largest housing complexes for foreign contract workers in the GDR, now slated for demolition.

The title cites Article 1 of the German Basic Law, which proclaims that human dignity is an inalienable right. Set against this claim, the work reveals the gap between legal principles and lived realities in such a dormitory, pointing to histories of exclusion, displacement, and racist violence targeting migrant communities. By transposing this personal site onto the pavilion’s fascist architecture, Tieu disrupts dominant historical narratives through private memory. Yet an undercurrent of beauty and longing lingers—unsettling the architecture's entanglement with structures of power. Four scents derived from Gehrenseestrasse permeate the pavilion’s interior, introducing a sensory dimension through which memory persists beyond the visual.

They Have Eyes, But They See Not, They Have Ears, But They Hear Not consists of eight hundred ladybird sculptures. In their accumulation, what appears decorative begins to resemble an infestation, evoking a latent sense of discomfort that destabilizes the promise embedded in the motif. Alongside, a drawing titled The House Which Is Waste depicts a scene from the ruin on Gehrenseestrasse.

In the adjacent room, But the Flesh Is Weak consists of glass casts of the artist’s mother’s arms and legs that render her body as a gläserner Mensch (transparent human)—exposed and subject to scrutiny. Marks shaped by labor and illness remain visible, resisting the clarity the material appears to promise.