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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

The collection of works in IN BERTY WE TRUST! consists of a novel, a series of drawings of torture machines and human flesh, and an animated video. IN BERTY WE TRUST! quietly unravels the points of transgressions that appear when human dependence on technology is taken to the extreme. Revolving around the theme of body/machine relationship, this series attempts to answer some of the questions that arise from the body and machine dualism/dichotomy: Is the machine an extension of the body (prosthetics, assembly line)? Or is the body, which consumes and as a consumable artifact, an extension of the machine?

The Hartford Girl and other stories is a multi-layered, allegorical narrative whose central image is the creation of a complex, inkless tattoo of 39 lines or ‘slashes’ composed purely of lines of text on the artist’s body. The tattoo visually and symbolically references the ritual scourging of the body in the Christian tradition. Jesus is said to have received 39 lashes on his back at the hands of his persecutors; a number believed by the Roman authorities to be merciful. The video is a close-frame documentation of the tattooing process, which was filmed over a four-hour period in the privacy of a gallery space. The central character, the ‘Hartford Girl’, is taken from a chilling American newspaper account of an attack by a crowd on a vulnerable, demoralized girl. The photographs reveal the finished work, a cross-hatching of linear scars of text covering the artist’s back, written free-hand by the tattooist.