Angela Su

Biography

Angela Su was born during the 1970s in Hong Kong. She graduated from University of Toronto and Ontario College of Art in Canada. Angela’s works have been exhibited in the 2nd CAFAM Biennale,17th Biennale of Sydney, Saatchi Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Solo Exhibitions

2013

2012

2011

2008

2006

2003

2002

Group Exhibitions

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2005

2015 “Mesures et Démesures”

Mesures et Démesures is a six-minute video that begins with images of flowers while a soundtrack of a tapping in a regular basis is heard in the background. It consists of pictures of late-19th century psychiatrists,Jean-Martin Charcot, and the terrific tests that he conducted on the patient who suffered from hysteria, a socially constructed disease that led to misuses of medical care and unjustified discrimination.

The video questions the construction of the ‘norm’ and induces the audience to reflect on the political abuse of psychiatry, such as the practice of incarceration of political dissidents in mental hospitals, and the attempt of social and individual control through psychiatry. Madness is a serious disease which brings a huge unfluence on anyone who is living in his or her own world, or is holding a completely different view comparing with others’. Collective madness is sanity. To criticize whether this kind of people pose risk on people or society depends on individual’s perspective: science and conventions derive social and political norms, the majority's moral power and hierarchical power relations that are all constantly unstable.

2015 "Hong Kong Bestiary"

The exhibition contains various animals' paintings. The show focus on the relationship between human and animals. Human always tend to consider animals as an organism which is very different from human. Sometimes people think that animals can reflect and define human beings. Human starts to take advantage of the animals. They intentionally use of the animals’ image to solve social, moral, environmental and political issues since the animals cannot speak and fight back. The artworks aim to bring out the underlying thoughts of the animals and let the animals speak to the human.

2015 “Methods of Art”

Method of Art is a one-minute video that was created in response to an artist interview conducted by curator Johannes Hedinger for his project ‘Methods of Art’ (MoA), an international video archive of artist interviews initiated in 2013 in Germany. At the beginning of the video, angela was caught into a hut by a man. And then it starts broadcasting a speech recorded by Angela, she apologizes for wasting audiences time to watch her video and her meaningless artworks, which is lack of wit, absurdity, humor and urgency.

2014 "Hartford Girl and other stories

“Hartford Girl and other stories” is a combination of an 11mins 35 seconds video and six photographic prints. The work is a multilayered, allegorical narrative documenting the intensive process of creating the complex, inkless tattoo, which is composed of 39 lines or "slashes" of text written freehand on the artist's back. The tattoo refers to the biblical account of the number of lashes received by Jesus prior to his crucifixion. “The Hartford Girl and Other Stories”, Angela Su further probe this subject of the experience felt by the human body. This video using both in the video voiceover and in the text inscribed in the tattoo to be the word’s narrative. For the tattoo, those are some prayers that are never completely legible to the audience, indicate an abstraction of the veiled search for forgiveness and recovery. About the video narration, it can clarify the feeling of Hartford Girl and descript the fictional character, random fact, newspaper’s report, lyrics and actual self-harmers’ testimonies.

If the two main property of tattoo are taken away, then the tattoo is no longer for permanent and decorative. There leaving only painful. "Hartford Girl and other stories" further probes this theme of feeling perception of human body. Also, it focus to the self-mutilation carry out in present culture, and the complicate meaning that exist inside the mental and the body.

2013 “In Berty We Trust!”, Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong

Sadomasochism, pain and torture were the themes of the show. Su's presented her artworks with animation, ink on drafting film and a book related to a machine named Berty. It was a new illustrated book presented with a set of drawings and a video animation of machine-body hybrids. It told a weird story of a factory worker became a serial killer who then got raped by a machine and gave birth to an abnormal child. The idea is about the extreme effects caused by over relying on technology. The book included Su's drawings, a postscript by artist named Nadim Abbas and an 18,000-word novella created by her Asia Art Archive colleague named Mary Lee.

2012 “Stigmatics - The Hartford Girl and Other Stories”

2011 BwO at Grotto Fine Art

BwO referred to Body without Organs which is an idea introduced by Gilles Deleuze to describe a virtual body without stable structures. In the drawings, Su used the concept of pain to influence our organic sensory and to break down the establishment so as to demonstrate the state of “dis-organization”. She described the body in an extremely meticulous way, even blood and anatomies were included in her drawing. Su hoped to express her thinking on pleasure in pain by presenting her painful objects and human organs abreast. The contradiction between the painting and the hidden meaning of the drawings challenged the audiences’ aesthetic standards, sense of beauty, and underlying desire.

Since 2010, Su has begun adding anatomical components and fantastical instruments into her art series. The artworks were first exhibited at a solo show at Grotto Fine Art in 2011. Simple tools were the main theme of the show. The group of work was combines into a series of machine. At first, Su has started to draw a tool which was a scissor. Then, the drawings have been transformed into some complicated machines. At the end, an assembly line appeared.

The idea of the assembly line was presented in a form of animation which was shown in a dark room at the exhibition. The sound of the work was trying to deliver the concept of “endless torture” and hint the audiences about one of the Su’s favorite films. The purpose of the sound was to create a mood that was similar to David Lynch's Eraserhead.

In the collection, torture machines, human flesh, apparatus are organs were shown. The artworks were exhibited in topographical perspective in order to make them look like the pages in an old textbook. All drawings were in single black ink and pastel on the drafting film. The works seemed like academic but Su actually drew on the concept of freedom and beauty of the soul.

2008 “One woman apartment”

It is a failed project that was voluntary to take place in 2008. Su finally decided to give up her project, instead to become one of the NGO's volunteer.

2008 “Paracelsus’ Garden”, Grotto Fine Art, Hong Kong

The exhibition displayed two main types of artworks which were ink drawings and embroideries. For ink drawing, Su showed her thoughts on the human skeleton in raw anatomical renderings. On the other hand, her embroideries were presented with juxtaposition and design. Su brought dreams and alchemy together to form a mysterious vision of nature and the human existence. Su combined her biological background with compositions in putting elements of alchemical and fantasy nature together. Her collection contained flowers, insects, and human figure. They aimed to present a personal response to the symbolic, iconic and figural self.

2006 “Senninbari”

2005 Fascinations

The theme of the exhibition is “fascination”. It is a collaborative artwork created by 4 artists named Suki Chan, Melanie Jackson, Leung Meeping and Angela Su. The artwork inquires ideas of collective memory, migration, labor, or race. The main idea of the project reflects to the definition of “fascination”. All four artworks records indistinct or personal narratives through different mediums included fabric, film, video, photography and sound to investigate a scope of human interactions or contentions.

2003 “Microviolence”

In April 2003, during the peak of the SARS outbreak, a woman dialed the major Chinese organizations in Toronto and proposed a comment to blame the local Chinese. She thought they have lived like rats and eaten like pigs, and the dirty disease was spread by them. In order to trigger the discussion about this kind of racial discrimination, Su took the original statement made by that woman and presented each letter within the sentence as bacteria cultures. The artwork does not reveal whether it agrees with the discrimination to the Chinese or not. It provides rooms of imagination and judgement to the audiences.

2002 “De Humani Corporis Fabrica”

De Humani Corporis Fabrica was a series with seven books written by Andreas Vesalius. It was first published in 1543. He precisely illustrated different parts of the human body which then facilitated the development of the modern scientific anatomy. With the same title, the exhibition purposes to explain the human body again by combining the scientific expression with artistic representation. In the art show, science and visual art are combined together to produce new images about the symbolic comprehension of the body.