To be immersed in the artistic practices of Andrea Chung is to be immersed in the worlds of geography, history, identity, ecology and resistance. Her work has multiple resonances within each of these nouns, and consequently, the viewer experience is both profound and nuanced. Though she was born in the US, there is no doubting the degree to which the multiple resonances alluded to have a distinctly international (or perhaps more accurately, diasporic) dimension. This diasporic perspective is not only born of Chung’s strong and unwavering commitment to social justice, it also, inevitably, emerges from her own biography. Chung was born to parents of Jamaican, Chinese and Trinidadian descent, meaning her heritage is not only Caribbean but, on account of the approximately two thousand kilometers that lie between Jamaica in the west and Trinidad in the east, pan-Caribbean. This sense of Chung’s pan-Caribbean heritage is further enriched by her connection to multiple diasporas, namely African and Chinese. Again, though Chung was born in the US, her work speaks to the sense of unbelonging experienced by so many people within the US for whom Blackness is a mark not only of difference, but, more crucially, of otherness. Gender is a distinct and recognizable thread that runs through much of Chung’s work, accentuated by the current reactionary climate typified by the recent Supreme Court reversal in women’s autonomy over their bodies. Ecological concerns also resonate through her pieces, and it’s not difficult to appreciate the varied reasons for this. After all, not only does her work speak to global concerns, it does so in large part through the prism of her Caribbean heritage and the ways in which the poorer people of the region are particularly vulnerable to climate change and the reckless ecological damage wrought by global capitalism and mass tourism.
There is a wonderful and pronounced oscillation between the historical and the contemporary in Chung’s work giving rise to graphic understandings of the ways in which historical events have such a pronounced bearing on the here and the now. Typical in this regard is her Colostrum series, in which Black women with their babies (represented by photographic representations of them, drawn from colonial-era archival images) are collaged with flora, generating multiple readings that empathetically speak to the gendered and racialized experiences of such women. A consistent feature of Chung’s practice is the wonderful titles she assigns to her pieces and her series, titles that offer multiple points of access. Typical in this regard is colostrum, a sixteenth-century word, Latin in origin, which refers to the first secretion from the mammary glands after giving birth, rich in antibodies. By applying such an original and deeply considered title to this series, Chung opens up a world of considerations of the abuses heaped on the Black woman (and more specifically, the Black woman’s body) during slavery, the ensuing colonial era, and on into present times.
… Within Colostrum, Chung draws sobering and visually engaging attention to the dehumanization and trauma of enslaved African women in the Caribbean forced to wet-nurse the babies of slaveholders, even as these women were cruelly stripped of their autonomy and ability to provide nourishment for their own children. Rendered on handmade paper that has the look and resonance of historic parchment, Colostrum in effect bears witness, bears testament, to aspects of Black women’s dehumanization and trauma not widely recognized, particularly by a dominant culture quick to practice a selective amnesia vis-à-vis historical cruelties and injustices visited upon Black people during enslavement and its colonial aftermath. But the most remarkable aspect of Colostrum, which marks Chung as a unique and noteworthy artist, is the arresting beauty of the series. It’s as if these women (whose names and identities we invariably do not know, on account of the dehumanizing inferiority assigned to them) are rescued from raced obscurity, and their humanity, personhood and autonomy restored through the manifestation of these collages. There is a deliberate, pointed beauty and attractiveness in these images. A visual restitution that, in marked contrast to the degradations and violations of slavery, becomes life affirming in its restorative impulses.
The above extracts are from "Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early: Some Considerations", a text in the catalogue published to accompany the retrospective exhibition of Andrea Chung's work, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, November 6, 2024 - April 6, 2025. Eddie Chambers' text on pages 18 - 25