Angela Su has touched new heights with her latest project for this year’s Venice Biennale, where the multidisciplinary artist is representing Hong Kong. Chitralekha Basu reports.

The centerpiece of Angela Su: Arise, Hong Kong in Venice, part of the upcoming Biennale, is the video The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O, which sees the artist suspended from the ceiling. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

For multidisciplinary artist Angela Su, her body is her canvas. Her video projects over the years present the artist in her different incarnations. In 2019’s Cosmic Call, she assumes the look of a human-insect hybrid. A pair of sleek, shiny stilts strapped to her legs are used to mimic swift, cockroach-like movements, while the twin mounds of her elaborate hairdo imply compound eyes. In Lacrima (2021), a video installation commissioned by the Helsinki Biennial, Su assumes the persona of early-20th-century psychic Nina Palladino. Wearing bobbed hair with bangs and dark lipstick, she entices the audience into a fantasy land where headless monsters roam. Most powerfully, in 2012’s The Hartford Girl and Other Stories, Su is seen receiving 39 lashes — a reference to the public flogging of Jesus prior to his crucifixion — in the form of Biblical verses tattooed onto her back. As there is no ink in the needle, the healed tattoo indeed resemble lash stripes, recalling the Christian ritual of self-flagellation.

The gothic, bondage-themed aesthetic of her get-up — fishnet stockings, cat eye makeup, a buckled or padlocked belt worn like a necklace — in films such as Methods of Art (2015), sometimes spills over to real-life settings. Asked if she prefers to remain in character when she isn’t performing, or rather, if she is perennially in performance mode, Su says it is the other way round: “The way I dress is just how I am. My work reflects who I am.”

By her own logic she could be embodying many people, transiting between different personas as a matter of routine. “Angela is very interested in the idea of a dissociated personality,” says Nick Yu, associate director of Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery and the curator of several exhibitions featuring the artist’s works. 

“I think the identity of Angela Su, the artist living in Hong Kong in the 2020s, is one more persona that she takes on, in addition to the Hartford Girl, Nina Palladino and Lauren O.”

Detail from Su’s Laden Raven hair embroidery piece. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Upside down

As Lauren O, Su will be seen trussed up and suspended from the ceiling, head down, in a video entitled The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O. It’s the centerpiece of her exhibition,  Angela Su: Arise, Hong Kong in Venice — a collateral event, supported by M+ museum and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, of the 59th Venice Biennale which kicks off on April 23. The character of Lauren — imagined as an anti-war activist from the 1960s — is a throwback to the risible yet true story of the political and social activist Abbie Hoffman, who claimed that he would make the Pentagon levitate in order to destabilize the US government sufficiently to stop the war in Vietnam.

Su’s philosophical inquiry into the idea of levitating — i.e. looking at the world from an unorthodox perspective — goes beyond obvious references to the suffering caused by US military action in Vietnam in the 1960s and the fact that similar large-scale human tragedies are unfolding elsewhere in the world at this moment.

“Levitation means many things … freedom, transcendence, the rejection of geographical boundaries and the physical law of gravity, lightness and humor, or the aspiration to achieve the impossible,” says Su, who went through painful practice sessions with the shibarist (expert in Japanese rope bondage) Avaem T. Rika in order to raise her endurance level.

Also featured in the exhibition are Su’s trademark, if slightly creepy, massive hair embroidery pieces. Laden Raven, a highlight of the series, looks like a bird with a human fetus inside its exposed womb. Within its huge, sprawling wings, feathers are interspersed with bare bones, bringing to mind the albatross in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — a protector figure shot down as a result of one man’s hubris and turned into a haunting totem of death and disaster as a result.

The artist underwent rigorous training in shibari (Japanese rope bondage) to reach the endurance level that would enable her to perform in her Venice Biennale video. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Resurrecting the past

Typically, in Su’s works, the line between history and fiction is blurred. For instance, Lacrima’s Nina Palladino is a historical figure, yet the ghost “photographs” ostensibly made by her grandmother are the artist’s invention. Conversely, in Su’s Venice outing, Lauren O is fictitious, yet the implausibly named Laden Raven was a real activist-anarchist group in the ’60s.

Su notes that Laden Raven is an anagram of Vernal Edna (Andrews), aka Fern Andra — an American actress who found success in German silent films, and went on to script, produce and direct films. “She was a vaudeville actor, circus performer, tightrope walker, a film actress and possibly a spy during World War I, and also the founder of the anarchist group Laden Raven, comprising trapeze artists, funambulists (tightrope walkers) and others marginalized in society,” says the artist, adding that the outfit’s members went from being influential anti-war campaigners to wanted fugitives in a short space of time. As a result, “Laden Raven went underground in the ’70s. All records of them have been wiped by the authorities since.”

In her Venice outing Su resurrects a forgotten underground group that had opposed the American war effort in Vietnam. By treating herself to an upended view of that chapter in history, she is both undergoing penance on behalf of a group of persecuted anti-war activists as well as introducing a critical distance between then and now, even making light of the whole idea.

For Angela Su, art imitates life: “The way I dress is just how I am. My work reflects who I am.” (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Universal themes

Su was born and grew up in Hong Kong, where she still lives. She went to art from science, graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in biochemistry and following it with another in visual arts from the Ontario College of Art & Design University.

Most of her cultural references are borrowed from the West. Videos like 2015’s The Sewing Machine and Mesures et Démesures show a fascination for the steampunk genre. Curator Yu cites the films of Georges Méliès as among Su’s early cinematic influences, “in addition to those by Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang, Hans Richter and Busby Berkeley.”

When asked if there is anything specifically Hong Kong about her works, Su agrees that they, especially the scientific drawings, cannot be traced to her hometown. “But it is impossible for an artist as a person not to be affected by their immediate environment,” she adds. “The impact of science and technology is certainly universal; I prefer to make works that resonate with a wider audience.”

Yu, however, argues that while Su mostly chooses her material from Western sources — like the French poems in praise of female body parts (blasons anatomiques) she has embroidered with hair, or references to painfully tight corsets in The Sewing Machine — at the back of her mind there’s always a space reserved for Hong Kong while she’s making new work.

“One of the crowning achievements of Hong Kong over the past 100 years is that it’s been able to take on many different characters and (absorb) cultural influences from all over the world,” says Yu, in support of his thesis. “I think Angela’s works are an embodiment of this melting pot of cultures.”

If you go

Angela Su: Arise, Hong Kong in Venice

La Biennale di Venezia

Dates: Apr 23 through Nov 27

Venue: Campo della Tana, Castello 2126-30122, Venice, Italy

mplus.org.hk/en/exhibitions/venice-biennale-2022-angela-su

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com