Advertisement

‘Myths have more power than reality’: how Hong Kong show by Angela Su’s levitating anti-war alter ego draws on 1960s hippy movement to question truth

  • Visual artist Angela Su represented Hong Kong at the 2022 Venice Biennale with her exhibition ‘Arise’, and now a spin-off of this show has come to the M+ museum
  • Based on fictitious Vietnam war protester Lauren O, it includes erratic journal entries and whimsical 3D shapes in a composition straddling reality and fantasy

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
“Angela Su proudly presents: Lauren O—The Greatest Levitator in the Polyhedric Cosmos of Time”, at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, is Angela Su’s adaptation of her 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition centred on an anti-war alter ego from the 1960s. Photo: Lok Cheng/ M+

In April 2022, Angela Su opened her exhibition “Arise” at the Venice Biennale with a rousing speech that explained her latest alter ego.

Advertisement

Lauren O is an anti-war activist in 1960s America who believes she can float in air, and she symbolises a response to a world that seems frozen in apathy or paralysed by fear and conflict.

Each artist representing Hong Kong in the Biennale typically brings home a “response show” adapted from their presentation at the Venice Hong Kong pavilion.

Compared with “Arise”, the new version that has just opened at M+ museum in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District is more sombre in tone and ambivalent in its message.
Su photographed with some of the hundreds of polyhedrons that feature in her exhibition “Lauren O–The Greatest Levitator in the Polyhedric Cosmos of Time”. Photo: Lok Cheng/ M+
Su photographed with some of the hundreds of polyhedrons that feature in her exhibition “Lauren O–The Greatest Levitator in the Polyhedric Cosmos of Time”. Photo: Lok Cheng/ M+

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).

Advertisement
Advertisement