- Artist
- Sung Tieu born 1987
- Medium
- 3 digitial prints and ink on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 295 × 210 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the 2021 Frieze fund supported by Endeavor to benefit the Tate collection 2022
- Reference
- T15910
Summary
This is one of a group of works in Tate’s collection by Vietnamese-born artist Sung Tieu that build on a body of research into the 1980 recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This agreement brought up to 100,000 Vietnamese contract workers to almost 1,000 publicly owned German enterprises (Volkseigener Betrieb or VEB). All dated 2021, the works are two sculptures – The Earth and the Sky (Tate T15887) and Filling Gaps (Tate T15888) – each of which is paired with a unique work on paper, both entitled Work Contract (Tate T15910–T15911).
The stamped ‘work contracts’ form the narrative structure of this group of works. In each case, they comprise three framed pages that reproduce material held in the German Federal Archive, transcribed verbatim in German and Vietnamese, reformatted and stamped by Tieu with an ink motif of a fence. This motif is based on the design of a fence used in building construction and is applied to each sheet in an identical formation using a grid. It is a mark made by the artist’s hand but one that is controlled, a process of making that permeates these works. The text of each Work Contract outlines the standardised contract that was issued to and signed by every Vietnamese worker arriving in the GDR, including Tieu’s father. It not only sought to control workers professionally, detailing salary, holiday entitlement and working hours, but to control them social and bodily as well. In Article 4 of the contract, for example, it states that the employees must commit to ‘high levels of work ethic, discipline and productivity’, whilst further points acknowledge the employee’s duty to ‘protect Socialist property from loss and damage’ and to ‘utilise the opportunities provided to further their professional and linguistic qualifications’.
The Earth and the Sky and Filling Gaps each connect to a unique version of the Work Contract, though the sculptures can also be displayed without their respective contracts. They are found objects produced by Vietnamese workers that Tieu has sourced from the GDR state-owned enterprises. The Earth and the Sky consists of a pillow and duvet made at the VEB Vowetex factory, tightly strapped together by metal wire, and Filling Gaps of tampons made at the VEB Vliestextilien Lößnitztal plant, encased in a polished stainless-steel tube. Together these sculptures expose the hidden labour that drove the GDR’s industrial complex; the labour of Vietnamese workers is made visible by Tieu in the material form of the output of their labour – whether duvet, pillow or tampon.
Encountering The Earth and the Sky in the gallery, the viewer is presented with the constriction of the steel wire that binds the duvet and pillow together. There is a tension between the softness of the familiar domestic fabric elements and the hardness of the metal strictures. The strict rules of behaviour outlined in Work Contract are thus materialised in the sculpture. As in Tieu’s work more broadly, The Earth and the Sky is imbued with personal cultural testimony of the Vietnamese diaspora. It connects to bánh chưng, a direct translation in Vietnamese of the work’s title. Bánh chưng is a rice cake served at New Year that is wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with a lattice of giang strings, another type of bamboo, that is formally echoed in the bound constructions of The Earth and the Sky.
Filling Gaps draws attention to the specific and disproportionate control exerted by the GDR on the bodies of Vietnamese women. Article 5 of Work Contract demands that any changes to workers’ personal relationships which may have a consequence for their working relationship – ‘marriage, birth of a child, amongst others’ – must immediately be reported and made known to the employer. Together The Earth and the Sky and Filling Gaps evoke the realities of GDR state control over the lives and bodies of Vietnamese workers, but also allude to pervasive systems of social and political power more broadly.
Born in Vietnam, but growing up in Germany and working between London and Berlin, Tieu’s transnational practice explores the Vietnamese diasporic experience in Europe, imbuing her research into the dynamics of globalised capitalism and spatial dislocation with personal cultural testimony of the Vietnamese diaspora. Works such as these demonstrate her preoccupation with conflicting mechanisms of care and control as well as the volatile social conditions that impact life in the Vietnamese diaspora. While addressing social and cultural class divides now and in recent history, Tieu’s work foregrounds the ways information has historically been manipulated as a tool of imperialist violence.
Further reading
Cédric Fauq and Damian Lentini (eds.), Sung Tieu: Oath Against Minimalism, London 2020.
Nathan Ladd
October 2021
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