Called “Lauren O–The Greatest Levitator in the Polyhedric Cosmos of Time”, it features many new objects that were not seen before, although Su has retained a 15-minute-long pseudo-documentary that was the centrepiece of the Venice exhibition and was ostensibly about the sociopolitical context in which Lauren O lived (the hippy era, the Vietnam war, the Cold War).
The first of two dimly lit, wood-panelled galleries shows the “archives” of Lauren O that Su supposedly uncovered.
Some 260 pages of handwritten journal notes and illustrations are pinned to a giant display board. The text – all written in the same hand, presumably by Su, though she insists she merely “discovered” them – range from detailed accounts of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war to a rambling stream of consciousness that is difficult to comprehend.
Not that you are supposed to read all of them. Most of the pages are too high up to see and the text, which is densely packed together, is often arranged in shapes which makes it even more illegible.
These form the “mind map” of someone who, like so many women living on the fringe of society and dismissed as “mad”, was determined to find her own way to cure the world’s ills, Su said at the exhibition opening.
Another section includes around 200 handmade paper models of different polyhedrons – 3D sculptures – resembling a star cluster made up of fantastical asteroid bodies. Su says Lauren O became so “obsessed” with making new shapes, which she believed could be the answer to a new world order, that she became quite disturbed.
Meanwhile, music by a real-life 1960s band called The Fugs plays in the background. They were active in the protest movement and were known for subversive songs such as “CIA Man”.
Is Su doing all this to channel the spirit of another time and another place as camouflage? There are certainly some parallels between the geopolitics of the 1960s and today, and the handwritten notes and drawings of clashes between protesters and the police will stir memories of Hong Kong’s own mass protests in 2019.Artist Angela Su to represent Hong Kong at 2022 Venice Biennale
But the excessive amount of journal notes and the overflowing piles of polyhedrons merely leave us in a fug of incomprehension. In Lauren O’s “writing”, one senses a spirit which refused to go with the flow and was sceptical about some of the actions of her fellow protesters.
Taken together, this seems to be a display of the confusion and disillusion that follows the realisation that there is no such thing as moral exactitude; that truths cannot be separated from fantasy.
And there are bird symbols everywhere: from a 3-metre-wide hair embroidery that shows a raven pregnant with a human infant – a reminder of Su’s long interest in using images of fantastical, hybrid forms to symbolise metamorphosis and alterity – to other images of birds embroidered with human hair shown in light boxes mounted on exhibition stands. Humans have always dreamed of being able to fly.
Here, Su is taking flight from the restrictions of the contemporary.
But why did she invest so much effort in making all these objects – and then claim she didn’t make them? It could be an assertion of power – she is refusing to let her identity be pinned down.
Perhaps it is also an assertion that in this era of post-truth politics, “myths have more power than reality”, as one of Lauren O’s journal pages declares. And that is what artists do – they create myths. No wonder, then, that the Chinese title of the exhibition declares Lauren O to be “the strongest in the universe”.
Angela Su proudly presents: Lauren O–The Greatest Levitator in the Polyhedric Cosmos of Time, 2023. Cissy Pui-Lai Pao and Shinichiro Watari Galleries, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, 38 Museum Drive, Kowloon, Tue-Thurs and weekends, 10am-6pm, Fri, 10am-10pm, Mon closed. Until Oct. 8.
