Angela Su: Melencolia

The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University presents Angela Su: Melencolia, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Western Hemisphere. The title is a tribute to Albrecht Dürer’s masterwork copper engraving Melencolia I (1514), a divining rod for understanding Su’s varied practice. In medieval philosophy, melancholy is associated with insanity, and late in the Renaissance, it was also linked to creative genius.

The exhibition features work executed between 2015 and 2023, a period of immense changes for Hong Kong, Su’s home city. Key events during this period precipitated a layering in of collective and public topics with the artist’s long-time investment in the body. The works assembled—docufiction videos, installations, sculptural polyhedra, drawings, and hair embroideries—primarily employ an accumulation of referenced and appropriated imagery from two archives: historical documentary, experimental, and narrative film; and philosophical and medical drawings and prints. Accessing the liberating power of metamorphosis, hybridity, and transformation, her worlds—from micro (human cells) to macro (outer space)—turn the follies of the past and the incomplete imaginaries of the present into a magical space for self-reflection. Su’s omnivorous practice consumes and then instrumentalizes Western modern art, theory, and cultural history as a form of distancing. The fragility of the body politic is tangled up with psychedelic, magic, and morbid unhinged beliefs about out-of-body experiences, hysteria, and various other debunked foibles. They require an active counter-engagement consisting of utopic vision, liberation, levitation, and intensified resistance to the normalization of the grotesque. Yet, even this move to throw off the outtakes of cultural history seems to require a psychic intervention. Su interrogates the lengths human beings will take to control their own and others’ bodies even to the extent of summoning fantastical, irreverent, violent, and aspirational states to reach the seemingly impossible unknown.

Su’s videos often utilize montage featuring obscure clips. They map fictions of cyber realities, cosmological fantasies, cellular structures of disease, psychoanalysis and behavior therapies, and misplaced political beliefs shaped by authoritative states, in order to navigate the violence that interferes with bodily autonomy and the quest for collective freedoms. To create these works she mines the archive for existing film footage such as Busby Berkeley dance compositions in Lacrima (2021), found footage of so-called psychiatric hysteria in Mesures et Démesures (2015), or cell structures in Cosmic Call (2019). Su pointedly implicates herself, becoming an alias “other” as a form of survival. The liminal states of becoming “other,” and their instability, unseat methodologies of discovery and disrupt encounters with questionable histories.

Su’s drawings and hair embroideries render the internal anatomical mechanisms of invented bodies as if specimens inhabited by mysteries only the artist can uncover. Much of her work hinges on a strange recurring dream state as if Surrealism had been diverted by a system of digital reordering. The hybrid body in works such as Hanged Man’s Seed No. 1 (2023), Laden Raven (2022), and Juno (2019) are at their core symmetrical. Each features a singular body filled with organic material such as internal organs, animal body parts, filigree, plant forms, or roots. Su’s dance with alchemy keeps spiraling outward from a centerpiece of interiority, farther and farther out toward space and abstraction. From the grotesque to the sublime, Su’s unflinching investigations yield compelling works that grapple with questions of our humanity.

The exhibition is curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Director and Chief Curator, Wallach Art Gallery. An exhibition catalogue is available.

Angela Su holds degrees in biochemistry from the University of Toronto and in visual arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design. She presented Arise, Hong Kong in Venice in the Hong Kong pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale and Lauren O—The Greatest Levitator in the Polyhedric Cosmos of Time at M+ in Hong Kong in 2023. She published an art novel Berty (2013) and a science fiction anthology Dark Fluid (2017), in which she uses science fiction as a tool for social justice.