Sung Tieu

In her exhibition Bleed, Sung Tieu focuses on Switzerland’s role in colonial economies, especially the rubber trade and the scientific knowledge extracted from colonial territories that continues to benefit Swiss pharma today. The research highlights how biomedical science was tied to systems of domination, where medical care for plantation workers served profits more than people. This theme of control extends to measurement, with a new body of work inspired by 12th-century metric systems that were established by Bern’s merchants. Tieu links these systems to both the solidifying of Western knowledge as a universal truth, and to colonial expansion; the two having standardized and categorized human and more than human life. Using her own body as a point of measurement, she creates arbitrary metric systems that allude to the links between biomedical research and broader histories of regulation and subjugation.

Sung Tieu (*1987) was born in Hải Dương, Vietnam and grew up in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include presentations at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024), Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2024), Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2023), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2023), Mudam, Luxembourg (2022), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2021), Nottingham Contemporary (2020) and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020). She participated in various international biennials, including the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024), the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023) and the 34th Biennale de São Paulo (2021). Together with fellow artist Henrike Nauman, Sung Tieu will represent Germany at the 61st Venice Biennial in 2026. She is the recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2024, which has been awarded jointly with the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion since 2020.

The exhibition of Sung Tieu is kindly supported by the Shikishima Foundation and Gesellschaft zu Zimmerleuten.