[Many thanks to Veerle Poupeye (Critical.Caribbean.Art) for bringing this item to our attention.] The is the last week to view Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early, an exhibition curated by Adeze Wilford. The exhibition closes on April 6, 2025, at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (770 Northeast 125th Street, North Miami, Florida). The artist brings her Jamaican-Chinese and Trinidadian heritage, history, and concerns to the fore while exploring the legacy of colonialism and the effects of neocolonialism today.
Here are excerpts from a review by Francess Archer Dunbar— “Andrea Chung’s Afrofuturism of Cyanotypes and Sugar” — who explains, “The artist’s show at MOCA North Miami follows her interest in destructive transformation as a path to a more accurate history.” Read the full review at Hyperallergic.
Andrea Chung’s Between Too Late and Too Early begins and ends underwater, so it’s only fitting that much of the work is actively dissolving. Surrounded by cyanotypes of the invasive lionfish’s bulging eyes, the cast-sugar boats of “Bato Disik” were reduced to amber gunk in a matter of hours after being immersed in salt water in North Miami’s hot climate and have been replaced by plastic replicas for daily practicality. The book forms of “Proverbs 12:22” have taken longer to fall apart, but they too slowly melt into a soup of beads and shells that recalls the African oral religious practices adapted and hidden in traditions of Christianity.
Bridging the artist’s older pieces with newer works, the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami follows Chung’s interest in destructive transformation as a path to a more accurate history. In “An Unrequited Love” (2019), videos show powdered white wigs being braided and twisted on a loop until they have lost their traditional forms. Chung pulverized a copy of early cyanotype artist Anna Atkins’s work to a light-blue pulp and re-cast the paper into delicate reliefs of West African fertility figures, similar to those that may have been carried by women enslaved on one of Atkins’s husband’s plantations. The delicate kozo paper draped on top mimics both the venomous spines of the lionfish and Atkins’s prints of Jamaican ferns and seaweed, invoking the dual exploitations of Black people and Caribbean land that enabled Atkins to create her work in the name of science.
Chung continues this practice of recreating and revising the island’s exploitative media,drawing direct lines between slavery and the low wages and labor practices that uphold cheap Caribbean tourism today. In Thongs: Experience the Luxury Included (2010), she cut out the figures of Black workers from a series of vintage Sandals ads and tourism photographs, embossing them away on sheets of white paper. “Come back to Jamaica,” a voice sings from a stop-motion video filled with the silhouettes of missing workers, finally given a symbolic day off by the artist. [. . .]
For full review and more artwork, visit https://hyperallergic.com/993802/andrea-chung-afrofuturism-of-cyanotypes-and-sugar-moca-north-miami/
[Many thanks to Veerle Poupeye (Critical.Caribbean.Art) for bringing this item to our attention.] The is the last week to view Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early, an exhibition curated by Adeze Wilford. The exhibition closes on April 6, 2025, at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (770 Northeast 125th Street, North Miami,
