A strange little house altar can currently be viewed on the ground floor of the Leipzig Gallery for Contemporary Art. The Berlin artist Sung Tieu installed it on the occasion of her solo exhibition “Multiboy”. The origin of the individual parts of the installation is listed very precisely on the list of works: On a porcelain plate with cherry blossom decoration from the former production of VEB Henneberg-Porzellan Ilmenau stands a red candle from VEB Wittol Wittenberg, flanked by two shimmering silver packs of “Mondo” – GDR condoms (VEB Plastina Erfurt) and two lilac-colored packets with “Imuna” brand tampons from VEB non-woven textiles Lössnitztal. To the right of the plate are two schnapps bottles from the VEB Weinbrand Wilthen with an amber-colored liquid, branded “Deutscher Rum Verschnitt”. All of this is contained in a minimalist, functionalist-looking altar shape made of matt polished stainless steel. The title of the work is “Offerings”, which could be translated as “offerings”.
Which spirits are conjured up here? With the arrangement, the artist, who was born in 1987 in Hai Duong, Vietnam and has lived in Germany since 1992, evidently alludes to the widespread house altars in Vietnam, which traditionally serve to communicate with deceased relatives. But what does Vietnamese everyday spirituality have in common with the sunken everyday product world of the East?
The subject is the “recruitment agreement” between the GDR and Vietnam
The connection, as other parts of the exhibition make clear, is a historical one. In 1980 the GDR signed a so-called “recruitment agreement” with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to counteract the labor shortage. As a result of the agreement, thousands of young Vietnamese were brought to East Germany as workers in the years that followed. At times it is said to have been up to 80,000 to 100,000 people who were distributed among 700 to 1,000 companies. Their stay was usually contractually limited to four or five years. They received training and toiled in production. They worked in power plants, in the Rostock harbor, as seamstresses or in the slaughterhouse and also in the factories that manufactured the goods that Tieu used for their installation.
Every now and then a sharp-edged sound drives through the otherwise quiet exhibition space. The rhythm sounds metallic at first like a thundering sledgehammer and then ebbs away as a two-dimensional ambient sound. The artist researched flight lists, home regulations, forms and contracts in various archives and followed the bureaucratic traces that not only allow conclusions to be drawn about the life of the Vietnamese “contract workers” in the GDR, but also about German addiction, the life of others down to the last detail to manage and regulate. For example, contract workers were prohibited from becoming pregnant or starting a family during their stay.
The artist copied the documents and processed them into graphic sheets, which now hang in the exhibition in Leipzig, framed in steel. Among them is a “list of selected items that may be exported by Vietnamese workers within a five-year period in the GDR”. After five years of work, the export of 100 kilograms of sugar and 300 bars of soap was allowed, as well as two sewing machines and a camera, as well as two mopeds – but without spare parts.
“The exhibition says a lot more about the GDR than about the Vietnamese contract workers,” says Tieu, whose father was one of them. When the Wall came down in 1989, there were around 60,000 Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR. The collapse of the East German economy meant for them not only the loss of training and jobs, but often also the loss of their accommodation in the company’s own dormitories, in which they were usually housed isolated from the rest of the population.
Racist attacks increased. In the unification agreement signed between the two German states in 1990, the residence status of the contract workers remained unclear. In the last days of the GDR, some companies organized charter flights and literally urged contract workers to return home. In quite a few cases, the agreed compensation was not paid. It was not until the second half of the 1990s that the residence status of many former contract workers in Germany improved.
The artist played a rather unsympathetic role in “Turkish for Beginners”
Sung Tieu came to the visual arts in a roundabout way. After a few years in Freital, Saxony, the family moved to Berlin in the mid-1990s, where Tieu went to school and did her A-levels. During her school days she was cast by a Munich production company for the ARD early evening series “Turkish for Beginners” in the mid-2000s, where she took on a role of a rather unsympathetic character in the first season. But Tieu did not pursue acting any further. After studying politics and administration as well as international relations, she finally moved to the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and later to Goldsmiths College and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Even before her exhibition in Leipzig, Tieu made life and work in legal or economic gray areas the subject of various artistic works. A few years ago she mixed a limited edition of 50 fake MP3 players with the offer of an electronics store in the Dong Xuan Center in Berlin-Lichtenberg. The artist had previously equipped the memory of the cheap devices with a sound work in beautiful dialectics: a commented audio walk through the Schöneberg department store des Westens, pretty much the opposite shopping experience to the Dong Xuan Center.
Last year she produced the installation “Zugzwang” for Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which revolved around bureaucratic decision-making processes in authorities that have to decide whether to accept or reject asylum applications. Tieu was particularly interested in what is defined as “fact” in this context and when certain information is accepted as “facts”. All too often, the positive asylum decision depends on the credible demeanor of an applicant and the coherence of the presented narrative, which must fit within the framework of the law.
In addition to the 34th São Paulo Biennale, which opens at the beginning of September, where Tieu will be showing two installations, the artist will have her next big appearance in Berlin, where this year, alongside Lamin Fofana, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff and Sandra Mujinga for has been nominated for the prestigious National Gallery Prize. Perhaps her installation in the Hamburger Bahnhof, the contemporary museum in the capital, will tie in with the installation that is currently on view in Leipzig. For Tieu, the history of contract work in the GDR has not yet been told, precisely because it has been swept under the carpet in the past few decades and thus made invisible.
Sung Tieu: Multiboy until October 3rd at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig. The catalog costs 28 euros.