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AThe blight of development hangs over the Gehrenseestrasse complex, an abandoned building in northeast Berlin, where the city still looms. Within the nine pre-planned blocks there has been an explosion; Six choices of windowless frames staring blankly at the traffic lanes. In the stadium, the painters left the wooden barriers from when they played during the Third World War.
Yet in one of the second-floor rooms of Berlin’s largest ruins, artist Sung Tieu walks the concrete floor and depicts scenes from his childhood. “Here was one bed where I lived with my mother for three years,” he says, pointing to the corner of the small room. “Two meters is 90cm, can you believe it?” There in the hall is where his neighbors used to make bánh bao seedlings on camp stoves, due to the lack of a kitchen. “I still remember the smell.” Apatu is the door where he used to entertain his best friend when his mother shut him up during work. “We used to play cards in the halls,” he recalls happily.
But he still remembers where the Neo-Nazis tried to throw molotov cocktails into the house: “In the end they put a net because the windows just broke”.
Nowadays, few people have heard about the difficulties of Gehrenseestrasse, which the last farmers left in 2002. But if Tieu told him, it would be worth stopping on the tourist route like the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag or Checkpoint Charlie. There is, in his opinion, no place that best describes the story of Contract workers generation – often forgotten workers who were hired on permanent contracts from “brother states” VietnamMozambique, Angola or Cuba to boost East Germany’s economy. Tieu said: “For me, this place is a monument
By the end of this summer, many people in Germany – and art lovers around the world – will know about their childhood home. About this year Venice BiennaleTieu has dressed up the German pavilion with the same image as the upper one, renovating the gray concrete and the dirty graffiti with three-dimensional stone made in Ravenna. He also designed the building after artist Henrike Naumann, who died in February of cancer at the age of 41.
Tieu, 38, is still unknown in Germany, but millions have seen his face on TV. Acting in his early 20s, he made an impact Turkish help section for Beginnersa comedy about a German-Turkish stepfamily. Tieu played a vain and vain student from the manga series, the interest of the character played by Elyas M’Barek, who is now one of the most famous German film actors. His character is called Chung, which is not a Vietnamese name.
The woman I meet at a Vietnamese restaurant in Berlin’s Lichtenberg district is the antithesis of this cliché: calm, dressed in black, analyzing her answers to my questions. He casually talks me through a lot of experimental food, but comes alive when he talks about bilateral agreements and labor laws.
“I try to avoid fantasy stories about refugees. By focusing on what has happened, you can lose sight of the big picture. Agreements, government agreements, floor plans – this is what I am interested in. There must be courage.”
When you look at his collection raisonné you are reminded of Marcel Duchamp. You see an artist devoting his work to finding minimal ways to express the same idea, from Cubist paintings to designs to chess game descriptions. And in Tieu’s case, that big idea is bureaucracy. In 2015, he renovated an LED display in a shop inside the Dong Xuan Center, Berlin’s largest market in Asia, to display documents on immigration contracts. At a group meeting at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2024, he wrote with handwritten documents from the archives of the East German pottery industry, confirming them with his beautiful stamp. He websiteappropriately, it’s just a long list of file names and part of a deadpan biography: “Sung Tieu is an artist.”
“I think it’s a childhood problem,” he says when I ask him where his interest in politics comes from. “I had to fill out my mother’s forms from the age of five, as she didn’t speak German. And by the time I was seven my German was better than hers. Freedom was part of my childhood – I studied politics and administration because I wanted to understand.”
Born in 1987 in Hai Duong, northern Vietnam, Tieu moved with his mother to the former socialist East Germany in 1992. They were allied with his father, who had immigrated to the GDR five years earlier through a bilateral alliance of industrial workers from the Socialist Republic.
Initially announced in the spirit of love of ideological cooperation, the cooperation between the two countries soon became a very strong cooperation, to overcome the shortage of work in the East. Germany and helping to rebuild war-torn Vietnam, which cut 12% of workers’ wages. About 60,000 to 70,000 workers from Vietnam arrived in the GDR between 1980 and 1989, making them the country’s largest non-white minority. But the one-party government tried to make it last forever: language education was reduced to a minimum; women who became pregnant were given abortions or asked to leave the country.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the closure of many factories that employed Vietnamese workers, a reunified Germany did not know what to do with such a small population. Tieu said: “We became homeless, because the Vietnamese government did not want us to return and delayed the requests of those who wanted to return. In a way, we were abandoned by three countries: the GDR, the Federal Republic, and Vietnam.”
The Gehrenseestrasse house where Tieu and his mother moved after his parents separated in 1994 was symbolic: a human container, far from the busy streets of Berlin – and a blank canvas for shooting.
Tieu’s co-producer, Naumann and curator Kathleen Reinhardt were both born in the GDR and struggled with East German identity in their exhibitions, which makes it tempting to make this year’s Venice gallery a first. Don’t copy. But Tieu, who gave up his Vietnamese citizenship to get a German passport in 2007, hesitates when I ask if he feels East Germany. It would make sense to see his project as the first exhibition of the Biennale to clearly explain what is being discussed as “baseball years”: the post-Wall period when the communist ideals of the socialist world were melting away and friendship between nations turned into bitter hatred.
Neo-Nazis regularly attacked the Gehrenseestrasse and beat workers walking home from the factories, even before the famous 1992 riots against the Vietnamese in Rostock-Lichtenhagen. Tieu remembers: “There was a lot of resentment against the Vietnamese workers who sent sewing machines and other white goods to their families back home. “Technically, there was no discrimination in the GDR, because it was not written.
Being selected to represent Germany in the most prestigious modern olympiad can be a poisoned chalice, given the historical challenges. this house which has national representation in Giardini. Originally built in the neoclassical style in 1909, it was given a more sinister look at Hitler’s request in 1938. “It’s not like a regular exhibition where you’re filling a neutral room, a white cube,” says Tieu. “You can’t show up here without thinking about this building.”
In the post-war period, every German artist in Venice was forced to enter into that dialogue with the Nazi era in their own way. Some allow guard dogs to urinate on all steps, others block the pedestrian entrance or close it completely. Often, the discussion involved destruction, erasing history: Joseph Beuys dug into the ground of the square; Hans Haacke crushed the stones; Maria Eichhorn exposed the brick walls and dug the foundation.
The Tieu Pavilion still speaks of the long-standing conflicts around Germany. Its title, Ruin, refers to the destructive passions of romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, and one piece of graffiti mentions the words “Wald“, which means “forest” – the fictional place of the legends and ancient Germanic tribes of Tacitus. But he tried to do what no artist had done before: to dress the building to give it a new identity, instead of just hiding the old one. After all, I came to Germany as a stranger and I added something to the world.
