Research Log
Threads of Resistance
Angela Su’s Hair Embroidery
by Chi-Chia Pao
Angela Su’s Hair Embroidery
by Chi-Chia Pao
October 14, 2024
In this research log, former curatorial intern Chi-Chia Pao discusses the power of the needle as both a wounding and a healing instrument through the works of Angela Su and Louise Bourgeois. When brought together, the works accentuate how textile art can express the possibilities of liberation and transformation under dark circumstances.
These and many other stories are part of the exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art which runs from 14 September, 2024 to 5 January, 2025 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
While working on the exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art during my internship at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, I became particularly interested in Wounds and Repair—one of six thematic lines pursued within the group show. This concept is closely tied to acts of puncture and suture and represents two sides of the same coin: the needle as wounding instrument and key to healing and recuperation. I was drawn in particular to Angela Su’s painstaking hair embroideries, where she weaves together beauty, anxiety, and agony, creating a labyrinthine world where art and science converge.
Through Su’s multifaceted approach, which spans drawing, embroidery, video, performance, and installation, the artist guides the spectator on a journey through illusion and reality, pain and pleasure. She deftly navigates the realms of art and science, offering a critical examination of the chaotic world. Her works serve as a potent commentary on the present, using the body and consciousness as her site of exploration. As she wanders through the city of Hong Kong, she observes the pervasive systems of surveillance, creating works that question authority and structures within science, especially concerning medicine and technology.
Before venturing into the visual arts, Su earned a degree in biochemistry in Canada. She embodies the analytical rigor of a scientist and the profound sensitivity and evocative expression of an artist. Su finds a common ground and interplay between science and art. Each discipline, in her view, is steeped in power dynamics in asserting authority by shaping perceptions and establishing norms. In science, this authority is often projected by using specialized language, complex methodologies, and establishing an objective truth. Similarly, in art, authority can be manifested through the power of interpretation, hierarchical structures, and the creation of cultural standards. Su exposes the fragility of this perceived dominance in science, revealing that its authoritative veil is not always as impenetrable as it seems. Through her lens, art and science are more alike than they are different: both are profoundly visual, often ritualistic, and laden with terminology that can alienate the uninitiated. Yet both strive to offer alternative perspectives on the world, and the universe we inhabit.
Su’s artistic practice involves creating embroideries that resemble anatomical drawings on fabric, where she replaces cotton thread with human hair, a material deeply connected to identity and the body. By doing so, she transforms the body into an important element within her work. Her use of traditional embroidery techniques, typically associated with domesticity and femininity, takes on new meaning as she subverts these notions and turns them into a form of protest. Her work probes the power dynamics that have historically sustained colonialism by using these traditional methods to challenge and critique the lingering effects of colonial rule. Hair, a material that is at once delicate and resilient, becomes a powerful political and cultural motif in Su’s work. Its intimate connection to the body makes it a potent symbol of identity, race, and gender, reflecting the tension between conformity to and resistance against societal norms, and revealing deep-seated cultural, historical, and personal narratives.
In her series Sewing Together My Split Mind (2019–20), Su addresses the violence, brutality, and constraints imposed on women’s bodies. These hair embroideries, when viewed from a distance, convey restraint, poise, control, and a scientific-like precision. However, upon closer inspection, they reveal a chaotic, irrational, and uncontrollable quality, with the loose ends of dark hair protruding from smooth pale fabric. This juxtaposition might symbolize the complex reality of Hong Kong particularly during the Umbrella Movement, a period marked by pro-democratic protests and political unrest. Given Hong Kong’s geopolitical position, historically suspended between Britain and China, and its ongoing struggle with identity as a special administrative region since the 1997 handover, Su’s work can be seen as a reflection of the turbulent cultural context in which she creates.
Hong Kong, often referred to as a fallen city, is burdened by its colonial legacy and has endured a relentless state of turmoil and uncertainty. The city’s once vibrant neon signs now dimmed, the cultural lines blurred, and its faded glamour are together a testament to its storied past. Su navigates these crowded streets, sourcing hair from wig shops in Mongkok, confronting both the physical strain of needlework on her body and the challenges of sourcing the scarce material. She notes that real human hair has become scarce since China, once the largest exporter, has grown wealthier, leading to fewer people willing to sell their locks to wigmakers.[1]
Fig. 2: Angela Su, Sewing Together My Split Mind: Chain Stitch, 2019, hair embroidery on fabric, 56 × 51 × 4.5 cm. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong.
Fig. 3: Angela Su, Sewing Together My Split Mind: Straight Stitch, 2020, hair embroidery on fabric, 56 × 51 × 4.5 cm. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong.
Fig. 4: Angela Su, Sewing Together My Split Mind: French Knot, 2020, hair embroidery on fabric, 56 x 51 x 4.5 cm. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong.
The technique of hair embroidery has a long history in Asian and Buddhist traditions. It was historically practiced by lay Buddhist women who used their own hair to create devotional images on silk.[2] This method combined women’s bodies, their hair, with the traditionally seen as feminine skill of embroidery, forming a unique gendered practice in Japan and late imperial China. By subverting this technique, Su transforms the act of sewing body parts into gestures of protest and rebellion, challenging the suppression of freedom of speech. Sewing Together My Split Mind: Chain Stitch (2019) alludes to the historical use of body stitching as radical protest, such as lip sewing by detained asylum seekers on Manus Island in 2014. This act of lip sewing is a double withdrawal—from nutrition and speech—that symbolizes the profound agency of those abandoned by society, expressing defiance in a silent yet powerful way.[3]
The series Sewing Together My Split Mind evokes a collective trauma and its aftermath. Perhaps alluding to the shared experiences of violence, oppression, and the struggle for autonomy, it encapsulates the process of scarring and healing. The visceral imagery—a needle piercing through a breast, an eye, and a vulva shaped like lips being sewn shut—adds more significance to the use of hair. The imagery in Su’s series also serves as instructions for suture techniques, embodying the delicate balance between healing and harm.
The Sewing Machine (2016) is a video work that scrutinizes the female body as laborer, consumer, object, and machine. Su here references Richard Kern’s 1992 short film The Sewing Circle, where Kembra Pfahler masochistically sews her genitalia shut, denying herself bodily pleasure and rejecting conventional female norms. Su’s video and hair embroideries explore the female body through the act of sewing, transitioning from a symbol of submission to one of subversive body modification. Su highlights how Pfahler’s act of defiance was inevitably co-opted by consumer culture, transforming a bold statement into yet another commodified object of desire.
Su’s work explores contradictory yet coexisting dualities, reminding the viewer of the myriad possibilities the future holds. Despite the dark and unsettling nature of her creations, they illuminate and reveal a path of resistance and hope for humanity. The contrast in her work suggests that even in moments of despair, there is potential for repair.
Fig. 5 Angela Su, The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O, 2022, single-channel video, 15 mins. 50 secs., Edition of 5 + 2AP. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong.
Fig. 6 Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 2000, fabric, 14 × 44.5 × 27.9 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Karsten Greve AG, St. Moritz.
Louise Bourgeois’s hanging textile figure, Arch of Hysteria (2000) is displayed close to Su’s hair embroideries in Unravel. As I researched the work of these two artists, a theme emerged that connects them: levitation. Su’s The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O (2022), despite not being featured in the exhibition, resonates with the theme in Arch of Hysteria. Levitation is a concept that transcends the physical, drifting into the psychological, social, and political. In both works, levitation is a powerful metaphor for liberation and transformation, even if each weave a different narrative.
Bourgeois’s figure, suspended mid-air in an arc of tension and release, hangs as a statement about the fraught history of psychological misunderstanding. Bourgeois’s levitating body is strung taut with the dual forces of pain and pleasure, straining against the stitches that seem to barely hold it together. It’s as if the body is on the cusp of either flying apart or achieving a moment of sublime transcendence. This levitation is a release from the weight of trauma, a suspension between suffering and euphoria, challenging the archaic notion of hysteria as a feminine illness.
Lauren O, a fictional character in Su’s narrative, is a circus performer and activist caught in the throes of 1960s counterculture, who believes in the power of levitation as a radical act of defiance. The name Lauren O refers to Anna O, the pseudonym of feminist activist Bertha Pappenheim, whose case was documented in Breuer’s 1895 book Studies on Hysteria. In Su’s work, levitation transcends the personal, becoming a collective effort to challenge and upend the oppressive structures of the time. Lauren O joins the fictional anarchist collective Laden Raven, a group dedicated to disrupting the status quo through unconventional means. Their attempt to levitate the Pentagon mirrors the historical protests of the era, blending reality and myth in a heady mix of fact and fiction. Lauren O’s eventual transformation into a disco ball—a mirror reflecting and refracting the energies around her—symbolizes the radiant potential of collective imagination and action. Su’s levitation is not just a physical act; it is a journey beyond the impossible, a questioning of reality, and an assertion of the power of belief and imagination.
Levitation, in the works of both Bourgeois and Su, serves as a form of escape from the burdens of reality. Through this motif, they explore the delicate balance between constraint and freedom, tension and release. They remind us that to levitate is to momentarily break free from the gravity of our circumstances, to hang suspended in a space where transformation becomes possible. In this shared moment of suspension, they invite us to reimagine our realities, whether by confronting the ghosts of our personal histories or by dreaming of new futures beyond the constraints of the present.
Chi-Chia Pao is a master’s student in Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam, with a background in Literature and Asian Art History. She has curatorial experience and previously co-curated the exhibition SHERO: Taiwan Contemporary Women Artists. Her research focuses on decolonizing museums, and during her internship at the Stedelijk, she contributed to exhibitions such as Unravel.
[1] Oliver Giles, “Arise in Protest: Angela Su Represents Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale,”
Zolima Citymag, June 7, 2023, https://zolimacitymag.com/arise-in-protest-angela-su-represents-hong-kong-venice-biennale/.
[2] Yuhang See Li, “Embroidering Guanyin: Constructions of the Divine through Hair,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, no. 36 (2012): 131–66.
[3] Banu Bargu, “The Silent Exception: Hunger Striking and Lip-Sewing,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 18, no. 2 (2017): 290–317.
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