Sung Tieu’s “Bleed”

Windows covered in yellow film cast a mustard pall over Sung Tieu’s exhibition. It’s an ambiguous color, as the wall text suggests. In the artist’s native Vietnam, yellow represents sovereignty. In this institution in the middle of Europe, the obscuring wash recalls a long history of racist othering of Asian populations by those in the West. The installation Yellow Line (all works 2025) culminates in a moment of artificial illumination. Grow lamps, trained upwards to highlight a gallery’s ceiling, reveal some of the building’s structure. Over the course of the show, further ceiling panels will be dismantled. Otherwise, the removal of all other customary gallery lighting leaves the viewer’s experience at the mercy of the weather. Is the institution stymied when it veils the art, rather than clarifying it?

Another thread through Tieu’s exhibition, the latest contribution to director iLiana Fokianaki’s program focus on the “Plantationocene,” starts in the center of town at the Zytglogge, an ornate bell tower with a large astrological clock.1 In the arcade beneath, several metal rules are fixed to the wall, replicas of standards of measurement first fixed there in the mid-seventeenth century as a reference point for traders. The foot, ell, and shoe are Swiss or Bernese standards. Tieu’s series “Corrective Measures” offers alternatives—the Artist’s Shoulder Span or Artist’s Foot, for example—each rulers with regular incisions or holes made in cast and milled aluminum here presented as reliefs, lying on the ground or propped against a wall. Some exude an air of sterile accuracy, others are more akin to stocks or other instruments of torture. It is egocentric, using her own body as the standard, underlining the coexistence of an individual with the systems that govern them.

Tieu mines Vietnamese precolonial and postcolonial history for source material, and here pursues her engagement with the methods of observation, measurement, and record-making that reinforced French control. The relatively young nation of Switzerland never had overseas colonies, but Swiss actors and companies profited enormously from other projects of indigenous disenfranchisement and extraction. Tieu brings one such figure to the fore: Alexandre Yersin, a lauded Vaud-born bacteriologist who first went to what was then French Indochina in 1890.

Yersin, who made the colony his home, was also instrumental in the introduction of rubber farming from Brazil, paving the way for massive deforestation and large-scale plantation. Alexandre Yersin presents an 1894 diary entry, typed and framed, in which the scientist describes the moment he isolated the plague bacillus in Hong Kong; it would be named after him, Yersinia pestis. “One of these coffins is opened, I remove a bit of the lime to uncover the groin area. The bubo is clearly visible; I remove it in less than a minute and go up to my laboratory.” His medical objectivity is dehumanizing, yet yielded benefits for humanity.

In the 1920s, the Michelin company established the then-largest Vietnamese rubber plantation. At that time, working conditions were at their most dangerous, malaria rife, and abuse standard. By 1900, Michelin had already diversified to make the guide book that encouraged drivers to travel further—on Michelin tyres—to discover restaurants. The silent, black-and-white video works Michelin* and Michelin** combine documentary material of tree clearance and US military helicopters taking off from a rubber plantation in the first, with camcorder footage of the artist and Kunsthalle Bern staff eating at a local Michelin-starred restaurant in the second. In a rare moment of black comedy, the latter experience is viewed through an uncomprehending filmic gaze, the Swiss flag-embossed butter and slimy, if undoubtedly expensive, food examined and dissected with knife and fork. Perspective is everything. So too in Views From A Sedan Chair (End), a title that might have been a colonialist’s memoir, but here is a silkscreen print on steel of twenty-four stills from an 1896 film Gabriel Veyre made in French Indochina. Not much can be read from the indistinct image, though the point is made: from the very first instances of filming Asia, the western perspective was elevated, at a remove, and widely disseminated.

“Bleed” is characterized by the seepages between the artist’s personal history and interests, globalized trade systems, and the Bernese locale; between historic events and their contemporary consequences; scientific, governmental, and cultural. The dominant tone is as impassive as the law, and the experience drenched in the ineluctable yellow. It brings a tangible relief to step into the clear air outside, where alps rise in the distance and the filters with which we live, if we are lucky, are invisible. For this privileged, white European viewer it was a brief, uncomfortable experience of being subject to someone else’s critical lens.