5th Century (After Wolfgang Tillmans)
Artist:
Sung Tieu
Date:
2014
Materials:
Glossy photo paper
Collection:
Lafayette anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
Domain:
Photographie
Sung Tieu’s trompe-l'oeil photographs use contemporary avatars of luxury as their lures. Here, a perfume called 5th Century resembles the iconic Chanel fragrance, but everything in this shot is fake. The counterfeit perfume and the style, not the artist’s own, are responses to the homogeneity of taste. The style is inappropriate, but not neutral, for Sung Tieu borrows from Wolfgang Tillmans’s preferred themes—photographs of raw values such as the gold bars of the Gold series or gleaming car bodies make up a sociolect (a variety of a language specific to a social group) that one would like to articulate. In this vein, Sung Tieu has produced several photographs that question the relationship between display and regimes of truth: through their ubiquitous presence in public space and on the widest variety of media, do advertising objects appear as good, fair, and true?