Angela Su (b1958, Hong Kong) studied biochemistry in Canada before turning to the world of art. And it is an alchemical mixture that she has conjured for her Arise: Hong Kong in Venice presentation. Her practice is centred around deep research into contemporary science as well as science fiction, and she has said: “Science, the history of science, the impact of technology and the transformative body are the recurring themes in my work.” Her practice is broad-ranging, including video, performance, drawings, hair-embroidery and installations.

For Venice, she has used almost all these media, in a layered, multi-room presentation, the centrepiece of which is her pseudo-documentary titled The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O. In this interview for Studio International, she explains that it was inspired by her reading about the history of protests, and the discovery of an unlikely but true story. In the 1970s, members of a charismatic new-age movement, based at Esalen in California, tried to use the power of their minds to levitate the Pentagon as a form of anti-war protest (in Su’s film, it seems the US military get their soldiers to train with this community, to gain greater mental powers). The central, fictional character in the film, Lauren O, was inspired by Lauren Olamina, the main character in Octavia Butler’s book Parable of the Sower, who learns to fly in her dreams. All the other elements in the show are, in some form or other, exploring the “psychological preparation for levitation”.

In the introductory room, 15 small video screens suspended from the ceiling show us a multitude of dancers, gymnasts and circus acts performing. Su says: “For a tightrope walker, it’s a constant balancing act to guess what’s safe and what’s dangerous.” She calls this video collage Tiptoeing the Kármán Line – after the line that notionally separates the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. In the second room, she offers us some of her trademark hair embroidery, and some finely wrought drawings of fantastical anatomical interior landscapes, as well as a video where Su herself plays a “risk” game, wielding a pair of sharp scissors with one hand as they dance around the other hand, dangerously close – and sometimes too close. “A lot of the work is about the interior of the body, physical transformation. Pain is also about risk-taking and you have to prepare your body mentally for that kind of process of transformation,” she tells us.

Beyond that room is her Lauren O “documentary”, which she describes as 90% fact and 10% fiction. It clearly speaks to the multiple oppressive regimes and invasions around the world today, and the various forms of resistance they have triggered. She says: “History repeats itself and I see a lot of similarities. I like to dig up forgotten histories like Esalen, and I learned a lot from the process.”

The presentation concludes inside with a large glitterball and then culminates, outside, with some concrete structures for gathering or performing, based on circus arts.

This Venice Biennale presentation was curated by guest curator Freya Chou in collaboration with the consulting curator Ying Kwok, and co-presented by the publicly funded M+ Museum and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

As referenced in this interview, Su has close connections with Finland, and has brought to Venice some of the artist friends and collaborators from her 2021 participation in So Long, Thanks Again for the Fish, at Levyhalli, Suomenlinna, Helsinki. In 2020, her work featured in 100 Drawings from Now, at the Drawing Center, New York, and Meditations in an Emergency at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. In 2019, Su presented Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, a piece commissioned by Wellcome Trust; showed Woven at Focus at Frieze London; and The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers at the Artists’ Film International at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. In 2017, she participated in Pro(s)thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Angel Su: Arise: Hong Kong in Venice
Arsenale, Campo della Tanna, Castello 2126, Venice
23 April – 27 November 2022

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

by HARRIET THORPE

While battles for equality continue across the globe, gender equality is an issue that Hong Kong’s M+ has been taking active steps to address over the past few years. New acquisitions have focused on works by major female artists, including Yayoi Kusama, Etel Adnan and Cao Fei, while more than half the art M+ has bought from emerging artists under the age of 40 in the Greater China region has been by women.¹

While M+’s highly anticipated museum building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is yet to open following construction, it has also been looking out beyond its collection, to the internet, with the intent of helping to spread the word about female artists from Hong Kong across the world. In collaboration with the Asia Art Archive, Wikipedia edit-a-thons have contributed to more than 100 new articles since March 2018.

This year, a new digital commission, hong kong artists, women, designed by Shirley Wu, a San Francisco-based data-driven creative, draws attention to missing data on Wikipedia and proposes a call to action for members of the public to research, authenticate and update it. Hosted on the M+ Stories platform, the new browser-based interactive resource is a scrolling mountainscape of visualised data pulled in from the Hong Kong Artists, Women category on Wikipedia.

As well as an important mission for M+, the project was also very personal to Wu. Growing up, she loved art and maths, but it was not until later on, after several years working in business, that she realised she could combine the two. She segued from business to work at Splunk, a company designing software for data visualisation, where she experimented with the programme D3, and then worked for Illumio, a business tool designer. She is now freelance, with the aim of working across industries to tell, through data, stories that are important to her.

“I am a Chinese American woman, and in the last few years I have started to realise how important my background is to me. I wanted to learn more about my heritage [Wu acknowledges the difference between the Chinese and Hong Kong identities] and uplift women. I realised how much not having visible role models that looked like me when I was younger affected my experience and self-confidence growing up.”

The hong kong artists, women project widened Wu’s scope of what an artist can be, and it took her back to her childhood, to her mother’s hanging scrolls in the hallway that depicted ink paintings of mountains over the four seasons. These personal memories would inform the visualisation of the data as a softly undulating mountainscape: “I really loved the idea of the women being represented as mountains, as being strong and resilient and powerful,” she says.

Wu made the work with WebGL, a programme commonly used for designing two- and three-dimensional graphics for browser-based games. It allowed her “more sophisticated rendering possibilities”, such as the dappled watercolour effect that Wu had always wanted to create, because she had loved painting in watercolours as a child.

“I was new to [WebGL], so it took me a month and a half to be able to get the colours right and to get the fog rolling through. I was really happy with the result I landed on, which is a juxtaposing of the strength and resilience of the mountains with this lighter, slightly, but not too feminine, colour palette in the fog.”

A legend shows the mapping between the design and the Wikipedia data. A mountain’s height represents the page word count and its number of peaks the number of linked references. Its colour highlights the number of other Wikipedia pages that mention the artist, and the stars surrounding the mountain each represent a male contemporary on Wikipedia.

Most importantly, the beauty reveals the shortcomings of the dataset. As you start exploring the terrain, you will see many low-lying, light-coloured mountains showing the lack of basic information in almost half the entries and the below-average word counts. The visualisation is a call for people to contribute the missing biographical information and add more women to the dataset to strengthen the mountainscape.

Visualising the data through colour, storytelling and personality is a compelling way to communicate information that we may otherwise find hard to digest. Wu says: “We as human beings tend to be very visually driven. Our brains are good at picking up patterns and motions, so, for a lot of us, when we see a spreadsheet of thousands – or tens of thousands, or millions – of rows of data, or a database, it’s hard for us to remember all of those numbers and then translate that into anything holistic that we can figure out and analyse from.”

Since the data was last collected in 2019, eight new articles have been added into the Wikipedia category. M+ hosted an event, Art+Feminism: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, in March, and Wu hopes that the visualisation might inspire some further additions and updates. The data will be updated every six months to show how the mountainscape is growing stronger and more resilient.

It is important to remember that even if this mountainscape is strengthened, this data reflects the representation of women through only one lens, Wikipedia, and there is a lot of ambiguity within the dataset. Wu flags the non-binary and self-defined spectrums associated with gender, nationality and the role of the artist, for example, and points out that Wikipedia, an English language resource, is inherently skewed to a western perspective, along with the questionable authenticity of user-contributed data.

Wu compares it to a previous project, Legends (2018), a data visualisation of female Nobel Laureates which, while highlighting the inequality between 51 females to 853 men, was a definitive and binary list. Hong kong artists, women presented a new challenge, because the data set was “imperfect”, so discussions with M+ about the data, an in-depth methodology and a clear legend had to accompany the work.

“It’s always important that I, and anybody working with data, recognises and acknowledges the imperfections in the dataset and communicates that clearly. That’s why it’s so important for me to work with experts,” she says.

“There is a lot of danger in representing imperfect data without communication about the imperfection. We’ve been seeing that a lot [recently], because people who aren’t used to seeing data tend to see charts or visualisation and think that it’s very official and it’s telling them the truth, that there could be no fault in data. So, just as it is easy to lie with statistics, it is easy to lie with data, and it is easy to lie with data visualisation and charts. It is our responsibility to make sure it’s represented as accurately as we can and, where we cannot represent accurately, we communicate those inaccuracies.”

Wu advocates data literacy – always to look for the methodology and be aware of absolute and relative numbers – as a way to tackle the misreading of data and its inaccuracies. “I think that is especially evident in this pandemic because Covid-19 has generated so much data that it’s become really important for the public to be informed, but also to be informed on all of the numbers. The easiest way to digest those numbers is with data visualisation.”

“I remember reading something from either an epidemiologist or public health official that was about how one of the most important things when trying to contain a pandemic is trying to convince a public about the dangers of something before the dangers are apparent – so that communication with the public is really important.”

People of the Pandemic is Wu’s latest launch. It is a “hyperlocalised, co-operative and simulative game” that combines data on local demographics and hospital bed capacity from the player’s postal code. Based on this, the player makes weekly decisions about how often to go out and for what activities. Resulting mortalities are then measured in the community.

“The goal,” says Wu, “was to try to create understanding on the individual level, to give a more concrete understanding of how a pandemic might spread and have that be from an individual’s perspective. For that particular [project], there was a lot of imperfect data as well, so we tried to get that across in our disclaimers and in our methodology.”

Reference

1. At the end of April this year, the M+ Collection and the M+ Sigg Collection included 7,062 works across the disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image and visual art, as well as the thematic area of Hong Kong visual culture. Female artists/makers in the M+ Collection and the M+ Sigg Collection make up around 25% of the whole, taking into account that there are significant holdings that are not gender specific.

Shirley Tse (b1968, Hong Kong) first grabbed attention at the Biennale of Sydney 2000, with Polymathistyrene, a display of extruded polystyrene, whose foamy substance had been liberated from its usual utilitarian role and rendered into a variety of sculptural shelves. In the intervening years, the Los Angeles-based artist has moved away from using plastics to explore the concept of plasticity and the synthetic, using a variety of materials. For her Venice commission, Tse has produced a new body of site-specific work using new (to her) technologies and an entirely different material: wood – 30 different kinds of it.

She has filled the rooms of an old carpentry workshop opposite the Arsenale with a creeping wooden root structure, made from diverse wooden pieces, hand-turned on a lathe. Mostly, these poles and sections are unremarkable, but occasionally oddities emerge – a wooden bat, a snooker pole, an ornamental banister rail, even a wooden wine glass. Every element of this curious structure is affixed to its neighbour by a bespoke, 3D-printed joint. There are all varieties, from two-way to seven-way connectors, printed from 3D filament that comes from wood, metal and plastic. In this way, Tse’s work celebrates multidimensional, multifaceted structures born of accommodation and negotiation. With its title, Stakeholders (2019), the message is clear for our increasingly splintered, isolationist times. She says: “Wood, through the carving process in sculptural terms is a subtraction – you are taking material away – whereas 3D printing, in sculptural terms again, is an addition. You are building up layers. I am putting addition and subtraction together to show different kinds of influences.”

Within the courtyard, Tse has placed an evolution of an earlier work from her last show, Lift Me Up So I Can See Better (at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, 2016), “to create an optical net inspired by badminton”. A smashed-up racket and one in its protective frame lie either side of a cluster of strange playfellows, mounted on tripods. The curious objects that crown the structures include a motorcycle helmet enclosed by a net that emulates the neuronal structures of the brain, and a wind sock.

Beside this sculpture, which Tse calls Playcourt, she has placed two CB radio masts, attempting to pick up any analogue communications that might emerge from this almost antique communication form, not just from Venetian water-taxi drivers but from users further afield. “Ham radio, which is amateur radio, is another form of reclaiming the public domain of our airspace,” she says. It is a technology that was around before the internet, but, she says, a lot of the frequencies “have been used by government and commercial agencies, so the band left for civilians is very limited. There is still a community of ham radio operators who use this method. Most of the time, you only hear white noise. From time to time people make contact … the other day, I heard a signal coming from Ukraine.”

Tse is the first female artist to represent Hong Kong at Venice. She is presenting this work in collaboration with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and Gallery M+. Tse, who teaches at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, has exhibited at, and been collected by, leading institutions all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, the New Museum of Contemporary Art and MoMA PS1, both in New York, Kettle’s Yard, UK, and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand.

Shirley Tse: Stakeholders

Campo della Tana, Castello 2126-30122, Venice

11 May – 24 November 2019

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

by LILLY WEI

Deviating from past editions, which were located in once-abandoned, now highly developed industrial zones such as Overseas Chinese Town East and Shekou, the 2017 Bi-City (Shenzhen and Hong Kong) Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture (UABB), Cities, Grow in Difference, chose Nantou Old Town as its primary site. It is a densely populated “urban village” in Shenzhen with a history that stretches back 1,700 years. (Shenzhen, China’s first designated special economic zone, has usually been described more dramatically as a small fishing / market town on the Pearl Delta across from Hong Kong that has exploded in the past three and a half decades to become an economic powerhouse populated by an estimated 12 million people, a number that fluctuates since it is a city of migrants who come and go during the year.)

These urban villages – think of Beijing’s largely demolished hutongs (narrow streets or alleys) and courtyards – are in “critical condition,” says Meng Yan, who is one of the principal curators for the biennale as well as a prominent Chinese architect and co-founder, along with another lead curator, Liu Xiaodu, of Urbanus Architecture & Design. UABB participants, through the years – this is the biennale’s seventh showing since it began in 2005 – have offered countless suggestions regarding future urbanisation plans for the region. This one is focusing on micro-housing and smaller residential complexes as an alternative to the ubiquitous glass towers that have dominated the megalopolises of Asia and elsewhere. The policy of the city with regard to these villages has also changed. Once, officials would simply demolish them, condemning them as overcrowded, squalid fire hazards, the low-rise, literally named “handshake buildings” so close that residents could lean out and grasp their neighbour’s hand. Now they are being reconsidered as a viable means of housing and worthy of preservation, serving as a new model for urbanisation rooted in historical precedent as a way to shape the metropolis’s future more coherently and richly, exploring the idea of a southern city as a template.

Liu Xiaodu declares: “We had a theme and a strategy, then we found participants and projects; we did not want to emphasise famous artists. Some exhibitions will be changing, some will involve the street, the plaza and other outdoor spaces.” The goal was to arrive at a “more complex definition of the street, one that is not nostalgic and a reshaping of public space that in turn will reshape private space,” forming new community and architectural relationships. He continues: “This biennale is different because we introduced our projects into a space where people actually live. We had a different spatial vision, a more natural, organic one; our resolutions are not solutions. We wanted to minimise intervention and disruption and let the residents decide how to use what we introduced. It should be maintained from the bottom up.” 

Indeed, the curators said that some of the residents initiated their own regenerative projects in response to those of the biennale.

The artistic director heading this generously budgeted, city government-sponsored exhibition is Hou Hanru. A prolific, highly regarded international curator and writer, he is currently the artistic director of MAXXI in Rome, Italy’s national museum of 21st-century arts. Hou’s area of expertise is visual arts, unlike the directors of past biennales, who have come from the field of architecture and design. It should be no surprise, then, that visual artists in substantial numbers are included among the presenters, most of their work installed in two vast industrial buildings, the interdisciplinary dynamic between art, architecture, design and urban planning enlivening, expansive and more representative of the realities of cultural synergy and exchange.

The biennale is divided into three sections, Global South, Urban Village and Artmaking City, with Global South (and its subdivisions, South “South” and The Other South) as an overarching umbrella that shifted the conversation from an east-west experience and orientation to south-south, a less familiar opposition. All three sections are informative and imaginative, and are bolstered by an ambitious programme of speakers, workshops, and screenings scheduled throughout the biennale’s three-month run.

Among about 230 architects and artists (including members of collectives) invited from more than 25 countries is the Paris-based, Hungarian-born experimental architect and theorist Yona Friedman, whose influential ideas about mobility, informality and improvisation are a dominant thread stitching together the exhibition. His contribution is Street Museum, an interactive, collaborative work located in the park at the entrance to Nantou’s main gate.

Opposite it is Beijing-based artist Yin Xiuzhen’s Arena (2017). A metal monkey bar-like structure meant to be climbed, it is an outline of Shenzhen’s skyline, which ranks fourth in the world for the number of its skyscrapers.

Atelier Bow-Wow from Tokyo designed a series of gigantic, handsome, sleekly configured metallic hoods suspended over giant industrial fire pits surrounded by tables, benches and sinks, braced by a spare, pink metal scaffold. It was intended for communal cooking and eating, a meeting point for locals but the barbecue the collective had planned was cancelled because of a recent ban on cooking in public spaces as a way to regulate air pollution. Nonetheless, the collective remains upbeat, curious to see how local residents will transform and use it.

Another standout is the Madrid collective Boa Mistura, best known for brightly coloured giant murals that billboard entire buildings in painted images and text worldwide, often in poor neighbourhoods such as the favelas of São Paulo. The members of Boa Mistura work in collaboration with local residents and believe that painting is an act of purity and an easy way to communicate. They transform not only places but lives, citing, as one example, a drug dealer who became an artist. For Shenzhen, they created Pingheng (balance, equilibrium): Understanding Chinese Reality on the huge facade of the main venue. In addition, they found a less conspicuous, smaller wall where they painted a mandala-like image in black and white whose Chinese characters, Taihe, translate as Supreme Harmony, a gift to the village.

Nearby Pingheng is Wego by MVRDV – The Why Factory, from Rotterdam. This is an extra-large, ingratiatingly pastel modular structure viewed as if in cross-section. It is backed against a facade and is divided into prototypes for living spaces that, like several other projects, are predicated on the desires and needs of the tenants, their plans negotiable and flexible. 

Jutting out from both sides of another industrial building that parallels the main venue, and visible from below as a curious terrace of sorts, is Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi’s continue forever. He sliced through the walls of a third-storey room and inserted a section of paved road across it as the floor. With the road came an actual car and other domestic objects placed inside, while, outside, a bicycle is lashed to the guard railings of one overhang. The fragment of road ends abruptly, with nothing to prevent someone from stepping out into air. Nishi always makes the spectator intensely aware of the character, and, usually overlooked, constituents of public and private space by taking the familiar out of context and edging it with a certain precariousness, in this case the destructiveness of urbanisation.

Lin Yilin, a New York-based Chinese artist, has used the shops that line one of the principal east-west streets (wider than most in Nantou, but still relatively narrow) as the inspiration for his performance. He talked to each of the shopkeepers, measured each storefront and purchased the products that each sold. He then arranged the items – fruit, pastries, buns, meat, appliances, housewares, electronic devices and so on – in a line that extends half the length of the town. Turning the “shops inside out,” he says, subverted the basic tenet of a consumerist ethos. By making everything accessible and literally in the street, he questions the usual relationship of exchange between shopkeeper, customer and object, the individual reactions of the people passing by – which run the gamut and included strong disapproval for wasting food – a significant aspect of the performance.

One disturbing event at the UABB indicative of heightened political tensions and escalating government control in China was the arrest of French-Chinese artist Hu Jiamin and his wife, Marine Brossard, a French citizen, on 15 December 2017. Their mural, Time Discrepancy, depicting an empty blue chair inside a room with a barred window, dedicated to the late Liu Xiaobo, the long imprisoned Chinese dissident and Nobel peace prize laureate, was censored. The government had refused Liu permission to go to Oslo to accept the prize in 2010. The empty chair, on which the prize was placed, has become emblematic of that refusal and Liu’s now eternal absence – he died of cancer in July last year while in state custody. Hu and his wife disappeared for nearly a week, although they are reported to be back in Lyons.

While the UABB has much to commend it, with abundant proposals and projects of note from the utilitarian to the utopian and futuristic, there is always the question of gentrification and what happens after the biennale is over. For instance, once Nantou has been beautified, will the migrants and those people on lower incomes who are renting there now still be able to afford it? Will the government hold big development and costs in check? Past biennale sites have become areas of exclusivity for the wealthy and tourists, a model seen frequently everywhere. When asked, the curators said that UABB has little power, it can only research and suggest, but the government does seem open to new resolutions, and they are optimistic.

A young resident of Shenzhen said she was hopeful when she saw what was being done in Nantou, with its new bookstores, a community centre, performance spaces, espresso bars and the many cultural events taking place, welcoming the excitement and the crowds of international artists and visitors. Gentrification doesn’t frighten her, but she wondered what would happen in three months, when the biennale is over.

Samson Young is a composer and sound artist, whose work anatomises and manipulates the alchemical power of sound and film by revealing the way culture and context mediate our experience of it. For the Venice Biennale, Young occupied four rooms near the Arsenale with his work Songs for Disaster Relief, an installation that he describes as “an album unfolding in space”.

The show is an immersive investigation into the psychological, cultural and aesthetic mechanisms of the disaster relief pop song. The main room features a dissection of the song Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which gave birth to the Live Aid phenomenon, fundraising for the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s. The lyrics – a saccharine mixture of phrases from the heartfelt to the bathetic – are embroidered in silver on to a theatrical curtain that stretches around the perimeter of the room.

The room itself is styled like the lounge of a knowingly kitsch, contemporary hotel, all mid-century modern furniture and neon lights. It is supposed to represent the fantasy palazzo of Boomtown Gundane, a fictional character whom Young discovered while investigating a “fake news” story. The story claimed Gundane was a South African musician whose response to the UK’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? song was Yes, We Do!, a parody of a disaster single, the proceeds of which were donated to the UK to “fund instruction in discipline, literacy and contraception at British schools”.

Young has decorated the lobby with various icons in reference to this fictional character, including framed fake gold and platinum discs. Snatches of melody saturate the space with a syrupy sweetness, switching from angelic choral voices and sweeping piano chords to lift muzak, highlighting both the formulaic – yet affecting – quality of these disaster relief anthems along with the banality of the lyrics.

In an adjacent room, a large film projection features a performance by the Hong Kong Labour Union choir, clad in formal black, singing the words to We are the World, but in an animated whisper, devoid of melody – which strips the song of its emotional punch. Just outside this room, in a small alley leading down to a Venetian canal, is another work, Lullaby (World Music), triggered by one of Hong Kong’s most iconic charity songs, Many Hearts Prevail, a response to a massive flood in eastern China in 1991. Its lyrics are sung in Chinese to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, and, in the video, Young is depicted singing unaccompanied, wearing headphones and looking out from Hong Kong across the sea to China.

Young was born in Hong Kong in 1979 and grew up in Australia. He has a major commission at Documenta 14 and is producing a five-part radio series for the Manchester International Festival, inspired by stories of 17th-century Chinese travellers who made their way to Europe on foot. He has been nominated for the Absolut Art Award and in 2015 won the first BMW Art Journey Award.

Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief
Hong Kong in Venice
13 May – 26 November 2017

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY