Andrea Chung’s Afrofuturistic Art: Exploring Cyanotypes and Sugar

# Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early – A Journey Through Memory and Transformation

## Introduction

The art of Andrea Chung is as ephemeral as memory itself. In her latest exhibition, *Between Too Late and Too Early*, at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA), Chung crafts an immersive experience that explores histories of colonialism, labor, and resistance through a transformative lens. Using fragile materials such as sugar and paper, her works physically dissolve over time, paralleling the erasure and reconstruction of historical narratives.

## Dissolving Histories: Art in Motion

Much of *Between Too Late and Too Early* is in a constant state of decay. Chung’s piece “Bato Disik,” featuring cast-sugar boats, was originally designed to disintegrate in water, symbolizing the fragility and impermanence of diasporic histories. In the oppressive Florida heat, her sugar sculptures quickly melted, necessitating plastic replicas for daily viewings. Likewise, the book forms in “Proverbs 12:22” break down slowly into beads and shells, recalling how African spiritual symbols were hidden within Christian traditions during slavery.

This theme of destruction as a means of reshaping history continues in other works. In *An Unrequited Love* (2019), videos display powdered white wigs being braided and re-braided until they lose their structured forms, suggesting a reworking of European colonial imagery. Chung literally reconstructs history by pulping a book of early cyanotypes by Anna Atkins—a British botanist whose work was enabled by plantations operated by her husband—into new reliefs featuring African fertility figures that might have been carried by enslaved women.

## Revealing the Invisible: Labor and Exploitation

Chung’s work critiques the ongoing exploitation of labor in the Caribbean, linking colonial oppression with modern tourism. The piece *Thongs: Experience the Luxury Included* (2010) removes Black workers from imagery in vintage Sandals resort advertisements, embossing their absence into white paper. The message is clear: the unseen labor that fuels the tourist economy is deliberately erased from mainstream narratives. In her stop-motion video, a voice croons, “Come back to Jamaica,” but the workers who make these vacations possible are nowhere to be found—finally able to rest in artistic intervention.

Additionally, Chung thoughtfully reimagines historical representations of Black women, adding embellishments such as beads and plants to old ethnographic portraits, thereby restoring dignity and agency to subjects whose images were often stolen and misrepresented. She incorporates cultural healing techniques into her work, like the *Colostrum* series (2020–2021), which is created using midwives’ handkerchiefs and infused with red raspberry tea, a traditional herbal remedy used to hasten labor.

## The Wailing Room: Collective Grief and Motherhood

One of the most affecting installations in the exhibition is *The Wailing Room*, a dark chamber filled with the sounds of joy and sorrow. Hanging from the ceiling are cast-sugar baby bottles, inscribed with imagined messages from enslaved mothers to the children they were forced to abandon during the Middle Passage. As the bottles slowly melt and shatter on the floor, they evoke both personal loss and the large-scale grief of historical trauma.

Motherhood is a recurring theme in Chung’s work, and here it takes on a deeply emotional resonance. The exhibition does not dwell solely in sorrow, however. It also gestures toward Afrofuturism and resilience, culminating in a hopeful alternative history.

## Submerged in Afrofuturism: A Vision of Liberation

The exhibition closes with an homage to *Drexciya*, an Afrofuturist legend that posits the lost children of enslaved Africans survived underwater, creating a submerged utopia. Cyanotype arms stretch out from the walls, as if beckoning viewers into this imagined world, a place where the invasive lionfish—symbolic of European colonial impact on the Caribbean—is conspicuously absent.

In the final gallery, one encounters a small library, a greenhouse filled with medicinal plants historically used by enslaved communities, and a series of haunting cyanotypes. These elements suggest a reclamation of power and knowledge, offering a layered meditation on survival, rebirth, and healing.

## Conclusion

As Chung deconstructs history through material dissolution, her work challenges viewers to reconsider dominant narratives and see history through new eyes. *Between Too Late and Too Early* does not offer closure but rather an ongoing dialogue—one where destruction begets creation, and where memory resurfaces like an island just beneath the waves.

Andrea Chung’s *Between Too Late and Too Early* is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami through April 6, 2024. The exhibition is curated by Adeze Wilford.