Angela Su: Arise,
Hong Kong in Venice
徐世琪：懸浮，
香港在威尼斯

Angela Su’s presentation at the Biennale Arte 2022 conveys a speculative narrative through interlocking fictional perspectives. The act of levitation serves as an organising metaphor that reappears throughout Su’s drawings, moving images, embroideries, and installations. The artist assumes the guise of a fictional alter-ego to explore myriad cultural and political valences of rising in the air.

The world Su creates in Arise is an assemblage of various contemporary expressions of how an individual can confront a changed and changing world. Fiction allows us to create this hybrid world, a space where we can explore ideas that cannot be confronted directly.

Angela Su: Arise, Hong Kong in Venice, is co-presented and co-promoted by M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

About the artist

Angela Su’s works investigate the perception and imagery of the body, through metamorphosis, hybridity and transformation. Her research-based projects materialise in drawing, video, hair embroidery, performative and installation works, which explore the interrelations between our state of being and the advancement of technology. Central to these projects are video essays and texts that weave together fiction and facts, reality and fantasy. With focus on the history of medical science, her works question the dominant biomedical discourse, and contemplate the impact of technology on the past, present and future.

In 2019, Su was commissioned by Wellcome Trust to present a new project in Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close curated by Ying Kwok at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. She has also participated in exhibitions in museums and institutions internationally, including So long, thanks again for the fish (Levyhalli, Suomenlinna, Helsinki, 2021); Sala10 (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, 2020); 100 Drawings from Now (The Drawing Center, New York, 2020); Meditations in an Emergency (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2020); Woven (Focus at Frieze London, 2019); Artists’ Film International (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2019); Pro(s)thesis (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, 2017); The 2nd CAFAM Biennale: The Invisible Hand (CAFA Art Museum, China, 2014); and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, 2010). In 2013, she published an artist novel Berty, and, in 2017, a science fiction anthology Dark Fluid, where she uses science fiction as a tool for social justice.

About the curator

Freya Chou is a curator and editor based in Hong Kong. She was in the curatorial team for the sixth and seventh Taipei Biennial (2008, 2010) and was Co-Curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennial (2014). From 2015 to 2019, she worked at Para Site in Hong Kong as the institution’s first Education and Public Programmes Curator. During those four years she also curated exhibitions: Ellen Pau: What About Home Affairs? – A Retrospective &nbsp (2018); Chris Evans, Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Exhibitions &nbsp (2017); and Afterwork &nbsp (co-curator, 2016). Chou has recently worked independently on research projects with several organizations, including Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. She has edited and contributed writing to many artists’ books, magazines, and exhibition catalogues. Chou is a member of the 58th Carnegie International’s Curatorial Council.

About the Hong Kong Arts Development Council

Established in 1995, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) is a statutory body set up by the Government to support the broad development of the arts in Hong Kong. Its major roles include grant allocation, policy and planning, advocacy, promotion and development, and special projects. The mission of HKADC is to support and promote the development of 10 major art forms in literary arts, performing arts, visual arts as well as film and media arts in Hong Kong. Aiming to foster a thriving arts environment and enhancing the quality of life of the public, HKADC is also committed to facilitating community-wide participation in the arts and arts education, encouraging arts criticism, raising the standard of arts administration, and contributing on policy research.

About M+

M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Located in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, M+ is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to be a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.