Angela Su
Angela Su received a degree in biochemistry in Canada before pursuing visual arts. Su’s works investigate the perception and imagery of the body, through metamorphosis, hybridity and transformation. Her pseudo-scientific drawings often combine the precision of scientific sketches with a mythical aesthetics, challenging the audience’s visual sensation of the pleasure of pain. Her research-based projects include drawing, video, performative and installation works that focus on the interrelations between our state of being and scientific technology.
In 2019, Su was commissioned by Wellcome Trust to present a commission project in “Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close” at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. She has also participated in exhibitions in museums and institutions internationally, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; the 2nd Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, China; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna , Austria; CAFA Art Museum, China; Saatchi Gallery, UK; and He Xiangning Art Museum, China. In 2013, she published an artist novel Berty, and in 2017, a science fiction anthology Dark Fluid where she uses sci-fi as a method for social critique.
Su currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
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Cosmic Call / 2019
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.
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Juno, Augustina and Juliette / 2019
Three full-body drawings of female cyborgs, Juno, Juliette and Augustina (2019) , reveal the interior of the woman’s body that is always too hairy, too leaky, and too messy. The skin, as an unbending border between the exterior and the interior, attempts to contain and control the leaky body. This constant negotiation of order and chaos, as well as the urge to break free of totalitarian control, characterises these fierce futurist femborgs. Vaguely legible behind the figurative drawings of Juno and Augustina are handwritten excerpts from the preface written by Brian Leung to On Hong Kong as a Nation (2014), a polemical essay tracing the nativist identity of Hong Kong from pre-modern history to the post-colonial era. Fully aware of the female body as politicised, decolonised, historicised and gendered, the artist imagines a chimeric vision of how to be a human body in precarious times.
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Sewing together my split mind / 2019
Hair embroidery is traditionally a medium practised by lay Buddhist women in late imperial China. These women were illiterate yet crafty, and created devotional images of the female bodhisattva (Guanyin) to enunciate their faith. Subverting the domesticity of this traditional practice, Sewing together my split mind represents the sewing of body parts as gestures of protest, acts of rebellion and the suppression of freedom of speech. The series alludes to the history of stitching body parts as performative acts of radical protests, for example, the lip sewing of detained asylum seekers in Manus island (2014), and artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz (1989), as well as the vagina sewing of performance artist Kembra Pfhaler (1992). In addition, the images in Sewing together my split mind are actually instructions of suture techniques, therein exists a tacit ambivalence between healing and harming.
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Comet Aureus / 2019
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The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers
“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.
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Rorschach Test / 2016
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.
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Rosy Nobody / 2017
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”.
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A Reminder to Myself / 2017
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.
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Dianthus caryophyllus conatus / 2016
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.”
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Armillaria Mellea / 2016
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 / 2016
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.
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We are standing in the spiral under a hammer / 2015
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.
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Mesures et Démesures / 2015
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.
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Chimeric Antibodies / 2011
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.
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Selected Exhibitions
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Press
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Review
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Review
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Media Coverage
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Interview