In the Waiting Room

Last summer, Sung Tieu began giving tours of a vast concrete ruin at the edge of Berlin not far from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It wasn’t a derelict techno bunker or a Nazi military outpost, but the housing complex where she lived for much of her childhood, shortly after moving to Germany from Vietnam at age 5. More than 6,000 Vietnamese residents, many of them contract workers, were crammed into the drab, monolithic blocks, which locals call Plattenbau (literally “plate building”) for the dully prefabricated construction. The nine towers on Gehrenseestraße have sat abandoned for nearly two decades, and are currently awaiting demolition by a private developer amid a flood of gentrification sweeping the east side of Berlin. Weeds grow head-high in some places, while all the windows, doors, and paint have long been stripped away. On her tours, which drew as many as 60 people, the artist recalled mostly rosy memories of the place, from playing in the yard with other children to the many adoptive aunties who helped raise her when her single mother was off working odd service jobs. “It was a very vibrant place,” she remembers. “I had friends on each floor of the block.” But, she adds, it was very different from life in Vietnam: “There, I was surrounded by my cousins, my family. At Gehrenseestraße, we had two beds in the apartment, which was very small—just 14 square meters [roughly 150 square feet]—and my mom sublet a room to a friend, so I shared a bed with her for three years.”

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These tours were a relatively ad hoc project for Tieu, whose meticulously researched artistic practice typically eschews biographical details in favor of historical facts and bureaucratic aesthetics. They were also a way to understand the context in which she grew up, and became culturally (if not legally) German, with a critical adult perspective. Her journey to asylum at Gehrenseestraße was long: It involved walking over the Czech border and subsequent visits to various immigration offices and detention centers. Her many neighbors described similar experiences. Tieu hoped that by taking friends through the site, she might shed light on the lives of the community there. In doing so, the artist highlighted much more about the immigrant condition.

At 36, Tieu has become one of the most incisive conceptual artists in Europe today. For one of her earliest works, Troi Oi, 2014, she set up Vietnamese flower and tea shops in various Berlin U-Bahn stations. The floral scents and living color on otherwise drab, underground train platforms introduced the vibrancy and ingenuity of Hải Dương, where Tieu was born, to the busy Berlin commute. Several more recent projects, such as Zugzwang, 2020; Multiboy, 2021; Song for VEB Stern-Radio Berlin, 2021; and No Jobs, No Country, 2023, incorporate the backless steel stools used in immigration offices, which are designed to prevent those waiting for appointments from resting easy. While a Tieu exhibition is often accompanied by written texts providing context, the work itself is fairly mute—meaning, Tieu notes, that viewers are free to
interpret it however they wish. Such installations are unavoidably cold and sterile, whether or not you’ve ever been to the facilities of the Ausländerbehörde.

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Tieu began showing work internationally in 2014, at the same time that the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) political party began gaining power across Germany, particularly in former East Germany, where Gehrenseestraße is located. Locals weren’t always welcoming when she and her mother arrived in Germany in 1992, but attacks on immigrants, particularly those from the Middle East and North Africa, have become disturbingly common in recent years. AfD now polls at over 20 percent nationwide, posing an existential threat to Germany’s government that has leaned centrist for nearly two decades. Tieu’s work draws from a well of personal experience—the look and feel of bureaucratic offices where she spent countless hours as a child filling out forms for her mother in German—but is also an equally poignant evocation of the immigrant condition everywhere. For instance, in “Civic Floor,” her recent solo exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, Tieu installed plaster relief panels of various immigration forms in a white-carpeted room, their surfaces rid of all text or other identifying symbols. Their rigid typology feels oppressively familiar to anyone who has had to stare into the gaping abyss of governmental bureaucracy.

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Many of the artist’s works also invoke the often-invisible labor of undocumented immigrants and other low-wage workers. “Loveless,” a 2019 exhibition at Piper Keys gallery in London, featured steel lunch tables with built-in stools that Tieu describes as a “custodial environment,” subversively transforming a commercial space for luxury commodities into a janitorial break room. Sound was a fundamental aspect of the installation, as it often features in Tieu’s work: kitchen alarms, slamming gates, and the hum of lights played in the space. Compiled from field and archival recordings, the noise added a creeping sense of anxiety to what was ostensibly a working class space of rest. If such moves make Tieu seem like a cruel host, it is only to cast our attention on the ways social structures make whole classes of people feel unwelcome.

In 2017, Tieu went back to the country of her birth to stage an exhibition at Nha San Collective in Hanoi. She had returned a few times over the years once she and her mother could afford the trip; most of her extended family still lives there. But, she says, “When I returned later as an artist, that’s when something else opened up for me.” She encountered a rich creative scene full of fellow artists who had found a way to make rigorous work while evading strict government censors—a challenge she ultimately had to confront, too. The show featured imaginary newspaper articles from 1969, supposedly written at the height of the Vietnam War, that discussed various real forms of psychological warfare employed by the U.S. government against the Vietnamese population. These included recordings of “ghosts” that were piped into the jungle at night, exhorting Viet Cong fighters to lay down their arms. The Vietnamese translation of the exhibition text made no reference to this, in a sense making a ghost of the memory.

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She also encountered certain attitudes towards those like her whom locals call Việt Kiều (“Vietnamese sojourner”), which designates those who live outside the country and have been able to travel the world. “I’m much more German than Vietnamese,” she admits. “The community is much more critical of the position of the Việt Kiều now. I wouldn’t want to move back and impose myself on the community of artists there who have been working locally for many years.”

Instead, Tieu continues to draw strength from her ability to cross borders between disciplines, mediums, histories, languages, and cultures. As the world grows more globalized, it has paradoxically thrown up more walls, allowing capital to flow freely while leaving millions of stateless people in limbo. That Tieu can make upwardly and internationally mobile visitors to commercial art galleries, fairs, and museums feel just as stuck, even for a moment, has far-reaching potential. Beneath all the cold steel and fluorescent lighting is a warm core of empathy.