Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In the first part of Cosmic Call by Angela Su the voiceover proposes in a neutral, documentary-like tone, a series of stories to rethink the way we usually understand, justify, or place blame for epidemiological events. Comets carrying an infective bacterium are linked with the invasion of viruses—our current nemeses—coming from outer space. Second-century BCE medicinal writings correlated the appearance of 29 comets over 300 years with events including plague and drought.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Produced in an interview format and as an extended chapter of Cosmic Call (2019) in the KADIST Collection, Angela Su’s True Calling by Angela Su documents the artist’s answers to a series of questions on the conception of her 2019 film that proposes speculative cosmic synchronicities for an alternative understanding of epidemics that is not built on the foundation and authority of Western medical science. Set in Hong Kong, each of the locations draw connections to places commonly tied to dominant disease outbreak narratives, such as a bustling wet market with butchers handling and selling raw meat products and the Hong Kong West Kowloon Railway Station, a cross-boundary transport terminus that sees a high traffic footprint and directly linking Hong Kong’s city center to Mainland destinations without interchange. As the artist travels around the city, she observes systems of surveillance such as police officers patrolling, security cameras, and an encircling helicopter, all playing an important role in managing the population and instating health security.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

From afar, Chimeric Antibodies by Angela Su may look like scientific drawings or botanical illustrations. Yet, upon closer look, sexual organs and imagined human and plant elements start becoming recognizable, and realistic. Each intricate, large-scale drawing indeed mixes human body parts, machines and other organic constructions as they become intertwined and inseparable.

Installation (Installation)

Stones and Elephants by Chia-Wei Hsu derives from the Malay literary classic The Hikayat Abdullah . The author Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who once served as the secretary of Major General William Farquhar, chronicled his life in Malaysia and published his writings in 1849. Hsu’s video installation excerpts two chap- ters from this classic.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marshal Tie Jia (Turtle Island) explores the history of a tiny island off of the coast of Matsu in the Taiwan Strait that has been instrumental in the geopolitical relationships between China, Taiwan, and Japan. The Chinese frog deity, Marshal Tie Jia, is now exiled to the island where he is still revered by the Taiwanese people. The installation includes documentation of the artist’s correspondence with the frog deity placed upon an altar, while the video explores both Marshal’s birthplace in China and his current home on Turtle Island.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair. Marshal Tie Jia is a frog god, who was born in a pond in Jiangxi, China, before fleeing to Matsu Island off the coast of Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution after his temple was destroyed. Spirit Writing attempts to reconstruct the original temple using 3D modeling software, operated in real time as Hsu asks the Marshal questions, receiving answers through a divination ritual in which the chair is swung violently around by his acolytes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The word Takasago alludes to several things at once. Takasago is the name of a multi-billion dollar Japanese corporation, previously situated in Taiwan pre-World War II. It is also a famous Japanese Noh play, the oldest extant form of performance in Japan, combining dance, costuming/masks, acting, and operatic chants.

Painting (Painting)

El mar y sus múltiples afluentes (The Sea and its Multiple Tributaries) builds on the concept of trafficking that Adriana Bustos has been exploring over the last decade. The piece represents an apocryphal river and illustrates the routes of the slave trade between the coasts of Africa, Europe, and South America, departing from the Congo River (once called Zaira), and arriving at Río de la Plata, the main river in Buenos Aires that divides Argentina from Uruguay. The work collapses time and space, placing the coasts of colonial empires across the colonies where slaves were taken.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Music While We Work (2011) is the first part/work of a long-term research project started in 2010. The project revolves around and beyond the history of sugar in the small town Huwei in central Taiwan (the artist’s hometown). The town was nicknamed as the “Capital of Sugar” during the Japanese colonial ruling (1895-1945) of Taiwan.

Photography (Photography)

For the photographic series Rumpty Trumpty , in 1997, Allan deSouza photographed the Trump Taj Casino in Atlantic City, NJ, reprinting the images again in 2017, from digital scans of the negatives. These negatives bear the traces of extensive damage wrought over time. These dust damaged and scratched prints appear as aged and out of date as the orientalist fantasy that they depict.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eschewing their current musicological function, 4 mourners on a mantel presents photo-realistic depictions of said figures on top of a hypothetical collector’s fireplace. Herein, these funerary objects are displaced as curios which stare back at the viewer in signs of grief and confusion.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This screen-print by Dread Scott titled Imagine a World Without America shows a map without the landmass that is the USA, as if the continents have drifted, or as if it never existed in the first place. Artist Dread Scott’s work is founded upon challenging “American patriotism as a unifying value,” and as such he claims that it is necessary to “burn the US Constitution (an outmoded impediment to freedom), and position the police as successors to lynch mob terror.” Perhaps one must imagine a structurally different world to produce new and freer modes of thought. While not explicitly related to Afro-Futurism, one of the key sub-genres of science-fiction and related thought is speculative revisionism; asking ‘how would the world be different if X never happened?” This modest work is a call to our daily imaginary, an invitation to zoom out to the scale of the global human condition, and implicitly America’s role in trade, war, cultural exchange, and the spread of western values.

NFT (NFT)

In conjunction with his first NFT sale of White Male Dread Scott made and circulated a poster titled Whites For Sale . The indigo-colored poster advertises a “cargo” of newly arrived white slaves, from which one will be for sale. This work is adapted from a 1796 slave sale announcement poster that is now archived in the library at Columbia University, NYC.