Sung Tieu's installations, characterized by austere, bureaucratic surfaces, explore the hidden architectures of power embedded in everyday systems. The article examines her series of works that deconstruct administrative forms used in asylum procedures, reducing them to blank spaces and quantified grids to expose how institutional power operates through seemingly neutral documents. Her exhibition "In Cold Print" at Nottingham Contemporary physically manifests these themes by using steel fences to control viewer movement, drawing direct parallels between minimalist sculpture and the dehumanizing design of border controls.
This analysis matters because Tieu's work offers a critical lens on how contemporary space is governed not by walls but by operational logics and infrastructures that organize movement and behavior. By making visible the blank spaces and coded relations within bureaucratic systems, she reveals the opacity of institutional power and its colonial residues. Her approach demonstrates how visual art can articulate the subtle mechanisms of control that shape migration, asylum, and daily life, connecting personal family history with broader systemic critique.