Sung Tieu

Without Full Disclosure
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen

Suppressed Stories

Sung Tieu (b. Hải Dương, Vietnam, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) ranks among the most exciting voices of her generation. At the age of five, she followed her father, who had arrived in East Germany as a contract laborer in the late 1980s, to a reunited Germany. Based on her personal experience of migration, Sung Tieu reflects on the ideological, economic, and sociopolitical structures that shape the life of our society. Her focus is on the critical infrastructures that decide who and what attains visibility. Employing a range of media including installation art, sculpture, photography, drawing, writing and sound, and found objects and mementos, the artist creates minimalist environments.

On the occasion of her receipt of the Rubenspreis’s 9th emerging artist’s award, Sung Tieu has developed the experimental book project Without Full Disclosure, which delves into the subject of fracking (hydraulic fracturing), a controversial technique serving to extract natural gas and petroleum. Working with the data analyst Gary Allison, Tieu has processed millions of entries in the database FracFocus, an American platform documenting fracking operations, to analyze the sheer quantity and chemical components involved with a view to the dangers they pose. Complementing her engagement with the questionable methods and sites of the fracking industry and its opaque public relations practices in the U.S., she also undertook research on potential sites in Germany, compiling over six hundred photographs. Her artist’s book combines these pictures with the data on more than one thousand pages to point up the incalculable ecological as well as health hazards.