Angela Su

Cosmic Call is a film that weaves together facts and fiction to create an alternative understanding of epidemics. The work resists the dominant narrative of a disease outbreak – a formulaic plot of a detective story about disease emergence and eventually the triumph of western medical science – and suggests multiple belief systems in which science is only one of many ways to understand communicable diseases. It points to the danger of reducing all knowledge to scientific terms while addressing issues that are pertinent to Hong Kong, which is characterised by its high population density and mobility – conditions that make Hong Kong extremely vulnerable to disease outbreaks.  It also addresses the importance of the history of epidemics for China and Hong Kong in recent years.

“The artist weaves together facts and arguments from a prodigious variety of historical and imaginative sources in what seems to be a documentary, culminating in a transformative, gothic action involving deliberate exposure to a series of virus.  In light of 2020’s COVID-19 epidemic, this piece has taken on an almost prophetic intensity,” written by Cuauhtemoc Medina for Su’s exhibition A Labyrinth of Contagion at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico.

Cosmic Call is commissioned by Wellcome Trust, the largest and most important medical history archive in the world. The work premiered at “Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close“ at Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), as part of the global Contagious Cities project, an international collaborative project presented by Wellcome Trust.

“The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers” consists of a body of work covering a wide range of media, including video, animation, performance, comic strips, photography, hair embroidery and installation. It contains two main intersecting narratives: the first thread focuses on the inner self and introduces doubling, hallucination and virtual reality; the second exposes external structures, relating psychiatry, social control and resistance.

In the perfect bilateral symmetry of the Rorschach test ink drawings, the doubling biomorphic forms emerge and evolve over two overlapping layers of drafting films, manifesting as vegetative and floral parts interpenetrated with human bodily organs, often in spiral patterns. Like the Rorschach tests used by diagnosticians in psychology, the images elicit not the viewer’s logical faculties, but the free-associating, deeply intuitive side of the human psyche.

Rosy Nobody are drawings of seemingly autonomous limbs, responding to the amputation, disembodiment and trans-humanism. in “The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers.” The question “what is an arm or a leg without a body?” probes deeper inquiries into the theory of consciousness and Deleuzean theory on the “Body without Organs”.

The militant activism of Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), in particular the call to “turn illness into a weapon”, is the inspiration for the work A Reminder to Myself, a set of eight poster banners composing of slogans, borrowed texts and found images fashioned in the style of SPK posters. Based on historical research, each poster tells the struggles and resistance of different individuals or groups, most of them deemed invalids, deviants or criminals, against the establishment system.

Dianthus caryophyllus is the scientific name of carnation, and conatus means double in Latin. The double flower is an abnormal phenomenon, a mutation, in which the stamens, its reproductive organ, become petals and emerges as a double. In his book Studies on Hysteria, Austrian physician Joseph Breuer painted a botanical, sexual, and aesthetic image of female hysterics, as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers.”

Commissioned by Para Site for the exhibition “Ten Million Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong” (2014), the work was meant to suggest the sensuous curtains used in massage parlour cubicles.
As an organic material, a part of human body, the medium of hair embroidery provides an anonymous yet universal connection to other beings. In addition, the fecundity of the armillaria mellea, the honey fungus, finds a visual analogy in an ejaculating phallus amidst a fountain of reproductive fluid, in the guise of a robustly flowering plant.

Blasons anatomiques du corps féminin is a series of old French poems that fetishizes the female body, which celebrates and at the same time scorns individual female body parts. The artist selected excerpts from 6 of these poems – blason of the hair, the eye, the mouth, the breast, buttock and the foot – and embroidered the original French texts with hair. The effect is at once seductive and repulsive.

This piece made from hair embroidery originates from an inkblot pattern of the Rorschach test. The original pattern eventually evolved into an organic form suggesting at the same time the human body, vegetal forms and animal shapes. All these dimensions are intimately merged and form an original pattern, be it futurist, primitive or fantasised. This new ‘creature’ could be perceived as an attempt to transgress all norms and to escape their narrow views.

Mesures et Démesures consists of found photographs from lunatic asylums, anatomical pathology, criminological studies,, timespirit photography and even tear gas and mugshots of anarchists, some of which are dated from the 19th century. Through the narrativizing diachrony of the series of images, the artist critiques the construction of the ‘norm’, the political abuse of psychiatry and the attempt of social and individual control therewith.

The composition of the Chimeric Antibodies series of drawings is inspired by ancient or alchemical imagination of energy flow and structures of molecules. Each drawing is a mixture of human body parts, machines and other organic constructions. The artist with her surreal ink pen is similar to an alchemist, transforming metals into gold, and mortals into immortals.