AC: Yeah, those things aren’t always planned. I’ll have an idea and I think part of the exploration of a particular material like sugar… I think I was trying to control it a little too much. I wanted to use the material but I wanted to make it permanent so it just wouldn’t move. I was killing myself trying to achieve that instead of embracing the material the way painter would embrace a color or their own material –how they can do certain things with paint. So I started to slowly embrace some of the natural qualities of sugar. Of course it’s going to melt. I started thinking of how that can add to a concept or an idea. As far as the smell, with sugar I hadn’t really been thinking about that. But in previous pieces I did want to incorporate the scent of various spices into the piece so that the smell of something would trigger a memory. It was a happy accident with the sugar. I was cooking it so much that I couldn’t really smell it anymore. I was just used to that environment. So I liked that that sweetness and that smell is very seductive and it helps to get the viewer wanting to investigate the piece. In some way it’s bittersweet…in a corny way of using that word. I like that it draws you in. And as far as the color of the water, that was totally unplanned. I knew that the sugar would eventually melt into the water but I didn’t anticipate it melting so quickly. The first time I showed those boats, the piece, it was incredibly hot here in San Diego and they melted away in a matter of hours. I was sort of horrified when I came into the gallery space to see the work. But I think it added a quality to the piece that you can’t really plan for. You can’t control how it’s going to melt. I mean, you can to a degree, but the sugar melted in a very gradated sort of way. I got these really beautiful hues of amber and now that I know that that is a possibility, I can start to play with those unexpected qualities. I think that’s why I continue to work with the same material. Every time I do a piece, it always changes –which is scary and exciting at the same time. But I’ll learn something new from that experience, which allows me to take those things that I’ve learned and add it to the next piece or the next process –into an object.

J: So something else that I know about you and your work, just from watching you. You do a lot of research and planning and a lot of careful brainstorming. Then you just sort of throw it all away and see what happens.

AC: There’s definitely a lot of planning. It takes me a really long time to come up with a concept that I feel comfortable with. I think it’s also the nature of the subject. I want to be very responsible, but at the same time I want to create this narrative that’s not too complicated and not too overwhelming –that anyone who’s unfamiliar with the history of whatever location or people or culture that I’m speaking of can connect to it. And also if you’re not well versed in the arts, that you can still take something away from the work. I don’t think I intentionally throw it all away, but I do want to be concise in a visual way. Sometimes I think that so much stuff can be so busy and I don’t think that’s the aesthetic that works for me and for the stories that I’m trying to tell.

J: Concise is a good word. You have a visual identity that you’ve developed that always striven towards elegance in –not necessarily in form– but in expressing an idea or evoking a complicated process or history. And I know that it’s important to you that the viewer can see you or your hand in the work. Is there a tension or conflict there, that you want them to see hour hand but you want to strip away everything that’s not important?

AC: There’s definitely tension. When I first started making work I hadn’t really thought about my personal process. I was trying to make something that was aesthetically pleasing. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I started out as a painter. And I wasn’t a trained sculpture. There’s an insecurity that comes with not knowing really how to make molds the way some of my peers can make molds. The history of sculpture wasn’t something that I was well versed in. I didn’t have the refinement in my sculptures or in my installations that I feel that I could sometimes get with painting. So that’s a thought process I went through. But I started to embrace my hand because I felt like it was an added part of the work. I really started to think about how the process related to the fact that I was talking about issues of labor. My labor becomes part of the story. Not in the sense of comparing my labor to their labor, but just showing the amount of work that goes into something –that I think people often times take for granted. It’s a struggle now because in some things that I do –for example I have these cut leaves called Natives– I try to get away from cutting two or three hundred different leaves, but I become engrossed in it. My labor becomes a big part of it because I’m talking about the artificial quality of these things and the work that goes into it. At the same time, I have to give up control in the sense that I can’t make every single thing. I have to get some things fabricated, like the large bath that my sugar boats sit in. I don’t have the technical skills to build that so I have to give that over. And oftentimes it does look a little more refined and polished. It’s a constant back and forth between how much of my own physical labor I want to invest in a piece vs. “you can get that pedestal made instead of having to take that work on yourself”.

J: You say you’re giving it over. Do you feel like you’re giving something up?

AC: Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes I question whether it makes the work more authentic, but I know that’s probably silly and a minor thing. But I really enjoy doing as much of it as possible. I don’t have assistants. I really try to learn how to do all these different processes on my own but I  am deathly afraid of power tools. I try to stay away from those as much as possible. I just don’t want to lose a finger! And I have been stabbed several times by my own Exacto knives, so I know I’m not handy. But I try to learn the processes all on my own or I will refer to someone that I feel is really well versed in something. They just give me a couple tutorials on how to do something and I just wing it on my own. Sometimes it works and sometimes it’s not so great, but it’s a learning process. That’s just part of my practice.

J: A lot of your work, especially the work that deals with history, there is always a multi-generational process that you’re discussing. For instance, when the formerly enslaved people in Mauritius refused to work the cane fields for their former masters, they chose a job that would not facilitate them getting land ownership, which means their descendants wouldn’t own land, which means their current descendants have diminished political power. And you talk about all of that in a sugar bottle. Or you talk about the way colonial language maps directly to the language of tourism. Is that intentional? Do you always look at cross-generational stories?

AC: Yes. If you reach back, well the great example is anything anyone has ever made about slavery. People think about slavery as “Oh well that happened back then! That was like four hundred years ago.” No, it’s not four hundred years ago. It’s a lot more recent than that and I think you need to make the connection with how that impacts us currently. No matter where you are, everyone is impacted by this. It’s not just black folks. Everyone in the Caribbean is effected by slavery. It influences everything. It influences the way the culture is, the way we speak, the foods we eat. It impacts the economies that are there and what they’re able or unable to do. It effects their relationship to the US. There’s no way you can separate those things. So when I make the work, for example the work that I do on tourism, I tend to find and mine archival images of king workers. The transition of when slavery was abolished and this free labor was no longer available to these plantation owners, they had to find a viable way to survive. It automatically went from one service economy to another. They turned to tourism. So you’ll see images of the same king workers who are now laying in the fields chewing on the object of their labor (which is a pretty ridiculous notion). A lot of those images were used to promote tourism in paces like Jamaica to say “they’re free, but they’re still docile”. And if you look at present day travel magazines, you’ll see a lot of the same imagery. The people who are working at hotels aren’t laying in fields, but they’re still sort of standing in subservient positions of bending down. I feel like that hasn’t changed. It’s pretty much the same type of imagery from the past going into the present.

J: Speaking of slavery, I remember when I first met you, you said you didn’t want to make work about it because it was such a huge subject. You didn’t want to drown in it’s vastness. But with these pieces, you’ve found a way to chip away at that vastness and talk about small stories. They’re related to slavery, but only in the way that black people everywhere are related to slavery. They’re not specifically about slavery.

AC: I feel like it is such a huge topic. There have been tons of artists who have covered the subject matter. I feel like for me, there’s a different way to talk about it, but not really talk about it. I’m more interested in contemporary issues and how we’re effected and how there can be connections. So with pieces like Bain De Mer, with the sugar boats and the video projection, I want people who are the diaspora, no matter where you are, whether you be in Trinidad or Mauritius– that you can connect to the story, that you can find some understanding and some common ground. That was something that I did experience when we were in Mauritius for that year. When I went to Mauritius, I was really excited to know that there were Chinese Mauritians who were Hakka, which is exactly the same culture that my grandfather was from all the way in Jamaica. I started to see all these cultural connections and I started to see that a lot of the Mauritians there connected with Jamaican and Trinidadian culture. I feel like if I can make work that is versed in contemporary issues and things that are effecting different locations in a similar way, that’s where I want to go with the work.

Andrea Chung is an artist living and working in San Diego California. She received an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2008. Her awards include a full fellowship to attend Skowhegan in 2008, a Fulbright Scholarship to Mauritius in 2009, a Joan Mitchell Fellowship to attend Vermont Studio Center in 2014, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2014.

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