hongkong pavilion Angela Su
The work of Angela Su (born 1958) is based on the hybridity and metamorphosis of bodies in response to the rigidity of political and social norms. It is perfectly in line with the mutant and surrealist works proposed by Cecilia Alemani and her Milk of Dreams. Passionate about medical biology, the Hong Kong artist became known for her series of anatomical drawings in ink on tracing paper representing fragmented, open bodies, whose organs are transformed into plants or insects. For the artist, it was a question of defying linear Darwinian evolution whilst claiming a form of bodily liberation. Her first series of drawings, Rorschach Test, some of which are on display in Venice, dates back to 2016. Like the psychological test they are based on, they invite free association but also an ambiguous unveiling of intimacy: the sexual organs of a flower offered like a carnivorous plant mouth, blood vessels interwoven with floral and botanical elements, an erect phallus, as if constrained, squeezed between tentacles… A sustained tension between emancipation and domination. In more recent drawings, these organisms have mutated, transformed into invalid cyborgs, expansive bodies whose organs overflow their corporeal envelope. As a backdrop, the fantasies of a post-human world.
In parallel, Su embroiders with hair, a technique that refers back to a Buddhist tradition practiced by illiterate women in China to express their faith and devotion. With Su, these embroideries embody subversion, a deaf and intimate resistance to any form of collective domination. Dissection of bodies and desires, vulva and closed lips, scars or cocoons: the hair suffocates, pierces, connects, mixing suffering and freedom. Laden Raven (2022), for example, depicts a foetus nestled in the heart of an imaginary insect, halfphoenix, half-butterfly, whose wings spread like giant phalanxes. We do not know if this creature is protecting this being in the making or, on the contrary, asphyxiating it.
TIGHTROPE NORM
All of Su’s work is fraught with ambiguities. It embraces the hybridity and contradictions of life and feeds on its carnival of forms. The symmetry of her compositions creates an illusion: the order to which they refer is a permanent state of unstable transit. Might the norm be a tightrope dancer?
In Venice, Su has turned the Hong Kong pavilion into a circus. In the courtyard, a giant swing evokes lightness from the outset, or the defiance of gravity. How far can we go with risk-taking without falling, the artist asks me during our interview? How are the current normative cursors regulated, that are constantly oscillating? For the artist, the circus embodies the grotesque and the monstruous, themes that run through all of her work.The exhibition is built around the semifictional story of Lauren O, a professional acrobat and member of a small activist group called Laden Raven, which was active in the late 1960s in the United States. These anarchists took part in the protests against the Vietnam War. In particular, in 1967, they tried to levitate the Pentagon with rites and exorcisms. The highlight of the exhibition, The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O (2022), a collection of archival fragments and speculative narration, also invites us to rise up, to open up to the diversity of identities and conceptions of reality. Through the circus figures, the idea of marginality and stigmatised bodies is summoned again, but also the worlds of childhood and dreams. At the heart of the show is the unexpected, poetic and non-productive logic of play as resistance to socio-political imperatives and the authoritarian escalation of our contemporary societies. •
Translation: Juliet Powys
Caroline Ha Thuc, an expert in Asian contemporary art, has a Ph.D. from the City University of Hong Kong (School of Creative Media). She is the author of Contemporary Art in Hong Kong (Asia One Books), After 2000: Contemporary Art in China (Mars International Publications) and Nouvel Art Contemporain Japonais (Scala).