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Aaina Bhargava

In June, I arrived at Sung Tieu’s Berlin studio on the second floor of a gated complex in the city’s northern Wedding district. It was 34 degrees Celsius (93.2 degrees Fahrenheit), the start of a punishing European heatwave, and the vast space was flooded with sunlight from large windows overlooking a green courtyard.
The studio is divided into two rooms: one for “messy work”, with tools, wide tables and raw materials; the other is a more office-like space that doubles as a library. Tieu hesitated over which felt cooler, then settled on the office for our conversation.
By then, the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale had been open for two months, yet Tieu is still processing the reactions to her very personal contributions.
“Ruin”, the exhibition the 38-year-old co-conceived with the late artist Henrike Naumann, and which was curated by Kathleen Reinhardt, has drawn both popular and critical acclaim.
The pavilion’s exterior is entirely covered in Tieu’s Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable (2026), a 1:1 mosaic-tile replica of the facade of the housing block on Berlin’s Gehrenseestrasse where she and her mother once lived.

The original building is a Plattenbau – a structure made of pre-fabricated concrete slabs typical of East Germany – that housed migrant contract workers from Vietnam, Cuba, Angola and Mozambique in the 1980s. It has been unoccupied since 2002.
More than 3 million mosaic pieces were used to transform the Venice pavilion’s neoclassical, fascist-era architecture into a representation of the dilapidated, graffiti-covered housing block.
“The process of adding something to the facade was interesting as a metaphor for me coming to Germany and building on something,” says Tieu, who moved to the country at the age of four in 1992. “I [also] wanted this facade to show present-day Berlin, in its ruinous state.”
The work also speaks about gentrification and the demolition of the past; soon the Gehrenseestrasse housing block will be knocked down and the site redeveloped.
‘The immigrant experience is completely neglected’
Memories of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) permeate the pavilion throughout, as Naumann, who died months before the Biennale’s opening, was also born in East Germany. Naumann drew on her family history, choosing a shade of green for the pavilion’s interior walls that recalled the abandoned Soviet barracks with which she was familiar.
A replica of a socialist mural painted by her grandfather, a well-known East German artist, hangs on one wall, in contrast to the cold, steely aesthetics of West Germany’s Neues Deutsches Design – or New German Design – evoked in a living-room replica on the opposite side.
Together, the two artists’ blend of the personal and political aligns with the late curator Koyo Kouoh’s theme for the Biennale, “Minor Keys”, which foregrounds overlooked histories and quieter, more intimate registers of storytelling.

To Tieu, the reception of “Ruin” is telling in itself, showing how the experiences of minorities are still eclipsed even when they are being given a platform.
“The funny thing is in recent reviews, [the pavilion] is mostly read in this East German context, and the immigrant experience is completely neglected,” she says.
That omission points to a wider blind spot. While the fall of the GDR and the Berlin Wall is central to modern German history and identity, the stories of migrants who arrived afterwards are often marginalised in dominant narratives.
“Germany needs to wake up to all its migrant communities,” Tieu says. “The Vietnamese community is not even the largest one, but it’s been interesting to be the first Vietnamese-German artist to represent the [country in the Venice Biennale].”
From hard sciences to the arts and politics
Tieu did not follow a straightforward path to becoming an artist. She switched from a maths- and science-oriented school to one focused on arts and humanities. To occupy herself after school while her single mother worked, she fell into amateur theatre, which eventually led to a role on a popular local television series called Turkish for Beginners.
At university, however, she diverged from the creative path and studied politics and administration.
“I’ve always felt an inferiority complex related to politics because I had to fill out forms when I was a child, as my German was better than my mother’s,” Tieu recounts. “Having to go to all those offices and face all that paperwork, I just felt inferior and didn’t understand my rights.”

That fraught relationship with administration, policy and bureaucracy has since become one of the defining concepts in her practice. In 2020, she began working with bureaucratic documents, investigating how a small box or square centimetre could be expected to contain a person’s life story and, in some cases, determine their future – particularly for asylum seekers.
“Within that space you are expected to reply to questions like: ‘How did you get here? Why did you want to – why did you flee?’ Are they expected to enter their life’s trauma in this tiny space?” she asks.
Bureaucracy’s reduction of human experiences drove Tieu’s interest in visually abstracting these fixed measurement systems.
For the 2025 Taipei Biennial, she made The Ruling (The Banque de l’Indochine’s Profits, 1875-1939), which consists of old coins used in French Indochina, a wooden ruler and a black rubber mat: all carriers of standardisation, measurement and value linked to regimes of extraction. The mat relates to the history of rubber plantations and the tyre company Michelin, which relied on Vietnam for its main raw material.

The politics of measurements also led her to examine the renowned 15th century German artist Albrecht Durer’s influential proportion studies, which were based on classical Western standards.
For Tieu, this prompted questions of what and who was considered worthy of representation.
“I found myself asking who I represent,” she says, adding that she can only imagine herself representing people she is close to.
A human touch in her work
The person closest to Tieu is her mother, and her presence is prevalent throughout the pavilion.
An abstract profile of a petite woman – made with a series of aluminium panels – appears on a wall inside the pavilion. On another, glass casts of her mother’s arms and legs protrude delicately.
“I liked the idea of bringing her into the pavilion, a rigid system. I need that contrast of someone I deeply care about, with that of the harshness of the system that both frames and represents her.”

That human touch is also a deliberate move to create resonance with those unfamiliar with Germany’s history or the artist’s personal one.
“Maternal love – that’s a very universal sentiment,” Tieu notes, emphasising that she does not want to impose her own perception onto the audience. “I’m not trying to convince you from a certain political position.”
The best way to convince people is to let them experience others’ perspectives, she adds. And for many visitors, that is exactly what they find at the German Pavilion.
The 61st Venice Biennale continues until November 22.


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Sung Tieu (centre) co-conceived “Ruin”, the German pavilion’s exhibition at the 2026 Venice Biennale, with the late Henrike Naumann (left). Kathleen Reinhardt (right) curated the exhibition. Photo: Victoria Tomaschko


An external view of the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. The facade is covered in Sung Tieu’s Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable (2026). Photo: Andrea Rossetti

The entrance to the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Photo: Jens Ziehe

Two works by Tieu in the German Pavilion for the 61st Venice Biennale. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

An installation view of Tieu’s The Ruling (The Banque de l’Indochine’s Profits, 1875-1939) (2025) at the 14th Taipei Biennial. Photo: courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Lu Guo-Way

But The Flesh Is Weak (2026), by Sung Tieu, at the German pavilion, includes glass casts of the artist’s mother’s legs. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

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The Vietnam-born, Berlin-based artist explains how her transformation of the 2026 German pavilion at Venice reflects immigrant experiences


The Vietnam-born, Berlin-based artist explains how her transformation of the 2026 German pavilion at Venice reflects immigrant experiences.


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3 million mosaic pieces later, artist Sung Tieu asks Germany to ‘wake up’ to its immigrants

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Vietnam-born, Berlin-based artist explains how her transformation of the 2026 German pavilion at Venice reflects immigrant experiences

The Vietnam-born, Berlin-based artist explains how her transformation of the 2026 German pavilion at Venice reflects immigrant experiences