Andrea Chung with HereIn
Vex V, 2020, collage, ink and beads on paper handmade from traditional birthing cloth, 17 x 13 in.
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a woman's head and shoulders, surrounded by green plants and white flowers, collaged on white paper. The gold outline of a rectangle is underlying the collage. The woman has dark skin, short hair, and a yellow beaded necklace. She stares off into the distance. Needles stacked with orange beads protrude from her figure.]
Multidisciplinary artist Andrea Chung talks with HereIn about materials, family history, and her new collage series, Vex, works from which were recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her first solo museum exhibition, You broke the ocean in half to be here, appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2017. Her work will be featured in upcoming exhibitions at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts and the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina.
HereIn: Andrea, tell us about what drives your work.
Andrea Chung: My practice is always changing, but primarily I’m interested in material and process. That’s what drives my practice— the curiosity of knowing what I can and can’t do with a material, and finding that area in-between. I tend to work with the same materials over and over again, because I don’t think you can ever master a material. You can just continue exploring it. Everything I use is, for the most part, ephemeral. I like that it’s ephemeral because the work needs to have its own history and its own lifespan. For me, those things are exciting. The subject matter is generally about the effects of colonialism on island nations, more specifically the Caribbean, although I don’t just limit it to the Caribbean. Investigating those concepts and imbuing the ephemeral materials is my thing. What I find the most fun is that it’s a challenge. It’s never something that’s planned out. Usually I make something based on an accident or a “mistake.” So for me it’s constant learning. I don’t like to get bored with the work.
Brain Coral, 2019, cyanotype and sugar, 60 x 44 in.
[Image description: The blue and white image of a brain is centered on dark blue paper. The bottom half of the image is covered in a crusty white substance, chunks of which rest inside the lower edge of the frame, as if having fallen off the paper above.]
HereIn: I see a connection between what you’re saying about the ephemerality of your materials and your subject matter. It’s rooted in history, as well as your family background— these are long trajectories that continuously change over time.
Chung: Yes, exactly. Culture always changes— it’s always evolving— so the idea that something could be static and preserved is sort of impossible. I like that the work does change and age based on location, environment, lighting, and everything like that. It also addresses what is happening in the world, culturally. The viewer may be looking at something from the past, but I want them to think of the present in relationship to that past, how they’re connected and evolving.
Sink or Swim, 2013, installation with sugar and fishing line
[Image description: An installation in a gallery space with white walls and a gray floor. Amber-colored, transparent bottles hang on fishing line from the ceiling. Some of the bottles are cracked, while others appear melted. Shattered bottles spread across the floor.]
HereIn: You have a distinctive and fascinating family history. How has it informed your work?
Chung: My grandfather was from China. He was a stowaway and came to Jamaica when he was around seventeen. I believe he was headed for San Francisco but ended up in Jamaica. He was there for a year and then went back to China, but couldn’t find his family. He came back to Jamaica and stayed. He completely lost contact with his entire family after that. I always try to think about what it would have been like to have been seventeen, escaping a situation— like Trump, but it was Mao— leaving your entire family, not knowing where you’re going but just trying to get out, and then coming to an entirely different climate, culture, and language. And surviving. What does that do to you? I wonder how, psychologically, that changes a person. It helps me better understand their situation and I try to do that with my parents, too. My dad’s mother was Jamaican, but she was Black and white. My mom’s mother was Chinese and Arawak, which are the indigenous people in Trinidad. Her father was Black and French from Martinique. Even just saying that, there’s a whole history you could investigate. I wanted to get an understanding of who these people were and what they were like, what they looked like, what was it like for them to live in those times.
A lot of my work stems from wanting know where I come from and who I am. I also think that a lot of times when artists make work about other cultures it becomes really problematic, so I feel that I should just make work about what I know best. What I know best is myself and my family, so let me focus on that and tell stories that stem from our situation.
Oonu Can Cum Wid Mi, 2007, photo cutout, 15 x 18 1/2 in.
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a dirt road in front of a group of buildings. Teams of animals, hitched to wagons, transport sugar cane down the road. Human figures— their images cut out, leaving white silhouettes— lead the animals and sit on a patch of grass. Text at the the bottom of the photograph reads, “A Jamaican Sugar Mill.”]
HereIn: How did your new series, Vex, originate?
Chung: Every time I start making a series, it’s never intentional. Whenever I would get stuck on an idea, I would do collages as an exercise— just for fun and to get my brain going, because I knew making would help. Collage seemed like an easy thing for me to have access to. I was making small collages and I could do them in my living room while watching my kid or cooking. I would make them and post them on Instagram. I was surprised by the response I was getting to them. I was just making them for fun and then people started contacting me about buying them. It’s not was I was intending! But I just kept making them.
I tend to use a lot of ethnographic photos I find online. Many of these were used to make cartes de visite. They were taken by photographers and turned into postcards for people who would visit, let’s say, Ethiopia. They would find a card that had a stereotypical image of an Ethiopian woman, and then would write something on the back and mail it to a friend to say, “I was here.” There is something really perverse about that. I question if these women— and I only use women— knew how their image was going to be used. We have the hindsight now to think about subjectivity and objectivity when looking at them, but I don’t think that’s a discussion that was being had in Botswana in the 1800s. I question whether or not those women wanted their images taken, and even if they did, did they really understand how that was going to impact the way that the world saw them? In some of the images, the women look mad. I thought there was something really interesting about the fact that they look angry. This person is still photographing you, even though it’s very clear that this is not something you want.
Vex IV, 2020, collage, ink and beads on paper handmade from traditional birthing cloth, 17 x 13 in.
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a woman's head and shoulders, surrounded by green, yellow, and white plants, collaged on white paper. The woman has dark skin, short hair, and a white sleeveless top. She tilts her head downward and stares intensely up at the viewer. Needles stacked with red and white beads protrude from her figure.]
Herein: Each figure is surrounded by collaged images of different plants. Do you select the plants with specificity or are your choices largely aesthetic?
Chung: A lot of the plants are indigenous to the women’s location. I take a diasporic or Pan-African view of the images I use, so some of the women are from Madagascar, some are from present-day Nigeria, some are from Brazil, some are from Guadeloupe. I try to show how this is something that happened to Black women throughout the diaspora.
Left: Midwives III, 2017, collage, 15 x 11 in.; Right: Midwives II, 2017, collage, 15 x 11 in.
[Left image description: A black and white image of a woman with medium-dark skin and hair pulled back, wearing an old-fashioned nurse's uniform with a gold cap. Next to her is a figurative wood sculpture. Overlaid across these figures is a transparent image of a leafy green plant. These three elements are collaged onto white paper. Right image description: A black and white image of two identical children, wearing black pants and white tops. They have dark skin and short hair, and wear gold crowns. Behind them, a transparent green leaf is overlaid across a large image of a figurative wood sculpture. A red string is stitched onto the page so that it appears the children are holding it between them.]
HereIn: What kind of paper are you using?
Chung: I had been doing a whole series on midwives prior to this and I made paper out of birthing cloths. Midwives would often use handkerchiefs as birthing cloths, which are used to clean up after birth. I was doing a residency in upstate New York and I was able to macerate the cloth and add pulp to it. I also added red raspberry tea, which was a healing tea that would speed up labor for women. I was able to make pulp from that and was pulling paper, which was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I love making paper. I had done a lot of things with that paper in some previous projects and I had a ton of it left over.
HereIn: That material and process speaks beautifully to ideas of matrilineage.
Chung: Totally. These works originated from the midwife— it’s an evolution of that earlier body of work. I was thinking about these women, as well as the Orishas [spirit figures that originated in Yoruba culture and spread with the Atlantic slave trade] that are protectors of women, mothers, and babies.
Vex VI, 2020, collage, ink and beads on paper handmade from traditional birthing cloth, 17 x 13 in.
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a woman's head and upper body, surrounded by green plants, collaged on white paper. Behind her head is the shape of a plant in gold leaf. The woman has dark skin and short hair. She wears a piece of cloth wrapped around her torso and draped over her shoulder, as well as orange and yellow beaded necklaces. She stares directly at the viewer with a somber look on her face. Needles stacked with orange beads protrude from her figure.]
HereIn: How did you arrive at Vex for the series’ title?
Chung: In Jamaica, if someone is mad you say they’re “vex.” I wanted to take that and turn it on its head, to make these women look visibly pissed. I wanted them to take ownership of their image and their bodies. I was thinking about nkisi, which are African fetishes where you would take a nail and drive it into a wooden figure, and you would ask for something from that nkisi. The more nails you drove into it, the more powerful that nkisi became. I wanted to make these women into the nkisi, except I decided to use needles. And then I beaded the needles with the colors of the various Orishas that protect women. What I liked about it was that you have to get close and intimate with it in order to see all the detail, but you can’t get too close. You’re not allowed to look past a certain point, because you can be stabbed by the needles. I saw it as a form of protection and guarding, and also being able to remain private and take your subjectivity for yourself, not allowing anyone to turn you into that object. It makes the viewer understand their place in looking at the images of these women.
This conversation has been edited by HereIn for length and clarity.