Angela Su’s True Calling
2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
5:03 minutes
Angela Su
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. Equipped with a satellite dish and listening device, Su continues her investigation into connections between cosmic bodies and human health by attempting to make contact with outer space using a printout of enigmatic symbols, similar to what she had discovered in her research for Cosmic Call. They resemble a series of interstellar radio messages sent by researchers of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) from Crimea in 1999 and also the signal containing messages coming from the direction of a comet passing through the Vega system, picked up in 2018 by FAST, the world’s biggest radio telescope located in China’s Guizhou Province.
Angela Su’s practice is derived from her two divergent backgrounds–she received a degree in biochemistry in Canada before pursuing visual arts. Known for her intricate scientific drawings where delicacy of technique is contrasted with ambiguous and sometimes unsettling content, Angela Su combines in her works the analytical approach of a scientist with a deep sensitivity toward the felt, visceral experience. She connects her ideas through her imaginative drawings to this blending of science and alchemy, and recognizes the mutability or change, in species, whether human animal or the insect variety. Interested in science-fiction, medicine, and advanced computational technologies, her works (drawings, video, hair embroidery and installation) focus on the interrelations between our state of being and scientific technology, and more recently her mental and physical illness and social control.
