Sung Tieu to Receive the 9th Rubens Promotional Award
In 2024, Sung Tieu (born in 1987) will receive the 9th Rubens Promotional Award presented by the City of Siegen. The award comprises prize money of €5,000, an exhibition in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (Museum for Contemporary Art in Siegen) and a publication. The award ceremony is scheduled for June 2024 and will take place as part of the opening of the award winner’s exhibition in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen.
A jury of experts agreed on Sung Tieu as the recipient of the award, an artist who was born in Vietnam in 1987 and grew up in Berlin. The jury members Prof Dr Sabeth Buchmann (professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), Patrizia Dander (head of the curatorial department of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen), Johan Holten (director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim), Kito Nedo (art critic and journalist) and Kathleen Rahn (director of the Marta Herford Museum) explained their decision as follows:
“Sung Tieu is one of the most exciting voices of her generation. Born in Vietnam, at the age of five she joined her father – who had been a contract worker in the GDR since the late 1980s – in the reunited Germany. In her art, she reflects on her own experience of migration which unfolds along the complex fault lines of the former East and West Germany and their respective allies. Not restricting itself to the biographical realm, her work addresses the ideological, economic and socio-political structures that define our social coexistence. Her focus is on the critical infrastructures that determine who and what is granted visibility.”
Sung Tieu creates minimalist environments and works with varying media including installation,
sculpture, photography, drawing, text and sound as well as found pieces and memorabilia. Her works are based on extensive research and often originate in relation to the close environment of the exhibition space and in cooperation with her collaborators. They deal with questions of societal responsibility and bureaucratic power structures with regard to social interaction.
Since 2015, Sung Tieu’s work has been displayed in solo and group exhibitions around the world. The artist recently held solo exhibitions at Amant, New York and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, USA (both in 2023); the CAPC - Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) and the Mudam in Luxembourg (all in 2022); Museion in Bolzano, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig (in 2021); Nottingham Contemporary and the Haus der Kunst in Munich (in 2020). Her work also featured in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo. In 2021, Sung Tieu won both the Frieze Artist Award and the ars viva prize as well as the Audience Award of the Preis der Nationalgalerie in Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.
The Rubens Promotional Award Presented by the City of Siegen
The University City of Siegen, in cooperation with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, awards the Rubens Promotional Award for an outstanding young artist every five years, alternating with the Rubens Prize which is awarded for a life’s work in painting and graphics. As the ninth winner of the promotional award, Sung Tieu follows Lena Henke (2019), Vajiko Chachkhiani (2014), Diango Hernández (2009), Peter Piller (2004), Silke Rehberg (1999), Karin Sander (1994), Julia Lohmann (1989) and Max Neumann (1984).
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