Sung Tieu has found a way to turn institutional critique into structural change. She's selling her 2025 work "Declaration of Donation" for €25,000, with every euro going to the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin to cover a five-year board position for curator Mi You.
The piece itself is the provocation. "Declaration of Donation" consists of a contract engraved across four mirrors—a deliberate choice that makes the words both visible and fragmented, reflective and hard to look away from. The contract calls out something specific: KW's €5,000 yearly fee for board membership, a barrier Tieu argues has quietly reinforced the same exclusions that plague most cultural institutions. When you have to pay to sit at the table, only certain people can afford the seat.
Tieu created the work for her exhibition "1992, 2025" at KW earlier this year, and it hung alongside another piece that speaks to why this matters on a deeper level. That work memorialized her own disqualification from a competition to design a memorial for Nguyễn Văn Tú, a Vietnamese person murdered by German far-right extremists in 1992 after arriving in East Germany in the 1980s. The timing—the year, the violence, the erasure—frames what Tieu is doing now as more than institutional housekeeping. It's about who gets to shape cultural memory, and who gets locked out.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxMi You, the board member Tieu's sale will fund, is a curator and professor of art and economics at the University of Kassel. The pairing is deliberate. Someone who teaches the economics of art, now sitting in a room where those economics actually matter.
KW director Emma Enderby called it "a provocation," and there's something quietly powerful in how the institution accepted it. Tieu didn't ask permission to critique the fee structure—she embedded the critique in an artwork, sold it, and used the proceeds to prove the system could change. The board member position is now funded. The barrier is lower. And the mechanism for change was art itself, which is maybe the only way an art institution can be truly moved.
What happens next depends on whether this becomes a one-time gesture or a model. But for now, one seat at the table just got easier to reach.
