LIKE SO MUCH ART of the present, the work of Sung Tieu necessitates a fair amount of explanatory text. Reading the growing body of writing about Tieu (the artist will open her first US solo exhibitions—“Infra-Specter” at Brooklyn’s Amant on March 30, “Civic Floor” at Cambridge’s MIT List Visual Arts Center on April 4—nearly concurrently), I was struck by the frequency with which the Cold War surfaced as a referent. The term rightly identifies the period about which much of the artist’s research is conducted, but also slyly tethers her object of study to her own artistic opera...