NORTH MIAMI — 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reduced to amber gunk in a matter of hours after being immersed in salt water in North Miami’s hot climate, and have been replaced by plastic replicas for daily practicality.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.
She also shrewdly critiques the cataloging gaze of White photographers by strategically adding and removing elements, using beads, needles, and lush tropical plants to embellish ethnographic portraits that were taken without the consent of the women depicted. In the Colostrum series (2020–21), these collages are staged on paper made with macerated handkerchiefs sourced from midwives and infused with red raspberry tea, a traditional remedy for speeding up labor.
Motherhood is a recurring theme in the artist’s work, and the emotional center of the exhibition is “The Wailing Room,” commissioned by the museum. The installation’s mix of laughter and despair echoes through the doorway, calling us into a small dark room. Dozens of cast-sugar bottles hang from the ceiling, filled with poetic messages written by the artist from enslaved mothers to the children they gave to the waves while enduring the Middle Passage. They melt and distend, periodically shattering on the concrete gallery floor.
The weight of that grief pulls us back underwater to the more optimistic vision of Drexciya, an imaginary Atlantis constructed by these lost children, who reach out as blue arms from a wall and sandy pit to rescue their mothers from the hardships of this world and welcome us to the deep, where the invasive lionfish are now nowhere to be found. In this final space housing a small library, a miniature greenhouse of abortifacient plants, and a series of cyanotype portraits, Chung’s melted histories submerge us finally in an Afrofuturist vision pieced together from fragments of an unjust past.
Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (770 Northeast 125th Street, North Miami, Florida) through April 6. The exhibition was curated by Adeze Wilford.
