Sung Tieu (*1987 in Vietnam, lives and works in Berlin and London) studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Tieu is a winner of the ars viva Prize for Visual Arts 2020.
Tieu’s practice; placing her work against the backdrop of bureaucratic power structures, global capitalism, the psychological effects of sound, and the legacies of the Cold War.
In Cold Print comprises of a newly conceived installation, including sound, texts, sculptures and architectural interventions. Tieu’s new body of work continues her ongoing investigation into the psychological dimension of warfare, acoustic weaponry and its relationship to Cold War ideologies.
At the heart of the exhibition, Tieu’s new soundscape manipulates material related to the so-called “Havana Syndrome”. First reported in late 2016 by US embassy staff posted in Cuba, it manifested in unexplained disorders and brain injuries resembling concussions, and was believed to be caused by a sound weapon. Spurring a multitude of theories, the US considered this to be a politically targeted attack. The Cuban government denies such accusations.
The exhibition space is dominated and divided by a maze of steel fences and concrete pillars. Within it, large vertical display screens showcase newspaper spreads, a continuation of the artist’s Newspaper 1969 – ongoing series. Acting as information agents, they reveal the complexity of the research material and the manipulated set up of the project, blurring the line between evidence, counter-evidence, science and conspiracy, while exploring how the dissemination of ideas can affect perception.
（https://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/whats-on/sung-tieu-in-cold-print/）
I was attracted by this project in her art exhibition. When I saw this work for the first time, I thought that I had heard someone say that listening to the music of the Baroque period can improve human memory (Lozanov’s music). Although this has been criticized as pseudoscience, I think music is a kind of frequency, and what happens when your brain waves align with the frequency of music… Of course, this is just my idea, I hope I can prove it myself later.
Later, I read the introduction to this project. It is a study of acoustic weaponry by Sung Tieu. Admittedly, acoustic weaponry will hurt your brain. When the sound frequency is too large to become ultrasonic when it will hurt people’s lives. I was impressed that Sung Tieu allowed himself to perform these sonic attacks and record the changes in the brain. It was striking to me that it was not just a work of art.