Levitation and levity in 2022 Venice Biennale’s Hong Kong pavilion, with Angela Su’s video art and hair embroideries

Artist Angela Su mixes the story of a fictional woman who believes she can levitate with 1968 footage of anti-war protesters trying to ‘‘levitate the Pentagon’

She is not making a statement about Hong Kong, she says, even if some viewers will want to see it that way

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Video art by Hong Kong artist Angela Su plays in the screening room of the Hong Kong exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Photo: t-space studio

Published: 6:15pm, 25 Apr 2022

For years, Hong Kong artist Angela Su has refined her use of a pseudo-documentary format to question the authority of supposedly sound and inviolable contemporary systems – psychiatric orthodoxy (“The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers” (2017)) or the rational thinking behind conventional medical knowledge (“Cosmic Call” (2019)), for example.

In her new film The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O (2022), which is at the heart of Hong Kong’s exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Freya Chou, she conflates fact and fiction in the story of a woman convinced that she had the power of levitation. In a dispassionate voice Su narrates real events in 1960s America using footage sourced from film and television archives while weaving in a storyline about an imaginary protagonist – the Lauren O of its title – and her fellow idealistic activists from a group called the Laden Raven.

Scenes of absurdity and hilarity (vaudeville performers, tightrope walkers, a woman travelling on top of a hot-air balloon) are intercut with clips from a “serious” documentary about the 1968 “levitate the Pentagon” protest against the Vietnam war, a Soviet “space dog” as it was being prepared for extraterrestrial flight, and a 1970s workshop in which a woman seemed to be howling while violent tremors went through her body. It was probably some intense exercise to release trauma, but her appearance was more suggestive of an exorcism.

“Arise”, which is the title of the Venice exhibition, is also a continuation of Su’s affinity with Gothic horror, which she expresses through intricate anatomical drawings and hair embroideries. A couple of older works here link the exhibition to previous explorations of transhumanism and artificial intelligence – big themes of our time that occupy many other contemporary artists exhibiting in Venice.

Artist Angela Su (right) and curator Freya Chou in front of “Laden Raven” (2022), a three-metre-wide hair embroidery that is part of “Arise”, the Hong Kong collateral exhibition in the 2022 Venice Biennale. Photo: t-space studio

There is some irony in the fact that Su is at the event to represent Hong Kong, which has its own exhibition as a collateral event alongside the official national pavilions. Her use of Western source materials – often historical – and English narration means she has always maintained an artistic persona not recognisably of any nation or specific time period.