Andrea Chung Crystallizes “Between Too Late and Too Early” at MOCA North Miami

This November in Miami, The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA) raised the curtain on “Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early,” currently on view through April 6, 2025. Here, a stirring solo presentation by the masterful Chung juxtaposes over 80 mixed media works for a sweeping and experiential show. A gripping journey through her innovative sculptures, collages, works on paper—and must-see installation—employs meaningful materials to peel away the stain of colonial legacies to reveal their profound effect on island nations. Chung’s thoughtful and bold experimentation with sugar and cyanotypes assist the artist in bringing the historical realities and sensorial memories of the transatlantic slave trade to haunting life. 

Whitewall had the opportunity to sit down with the skillful Chung to speak about deep exploration and the accepting of mistakes as an artist, as well as inspiring people to think about the profound impact of the things that we all take for granted. 

WHITEWALL: Can you describe your early exploration with emblematic materials such as sugar and avante-garde techniques like cyanotype photography in order to delve deeply into the many faces of colonialism?

ANDREA CHUNG: It’s funny because I don’t ever approach my practice in that kind of way, it just is curiosity. In grad school, I initially started off as a painter and I was not in love with the history of painting. I wanted to find other ways of telling stories about colonization and I was particularly looking at my family. 

I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got to grad school. The whole first semester there was a bunch of crying, trying to figure out how I even got in, and where I belong. All of my peers were already going, painting up a storm, or making whatever they were doing. I had a friend that took me out to go dumpster diving because she worked a lot with found materials. I took a shipping palette from our little adventure. It was from there that I started thinking about different objects that could represent colonization—particularly in the Caribbean. Sugar definitely came to mind as it was one of the most important crops that was being grown in the Caribbean. 

Also, I have a personal relationship with sugar. A lot of people in my family have diabetes. My grandmother actually died of having her second leg amputated from having gangrene. It’s very much a part of my family. I remember as a kid going to classes with my dad, he was on the cusp of getting it, and having to check his sugar, learning how to eat properly. I have another aunt that had it as well. It’s deeply rooted in my family, but also in the Caribbean. 

I found it to be something really interesting, to explore colonization then, but also how it still plays a major role now. A lot of the diets in the Caribbean are high starch, and a lot of that comes from the fact that those foods were brought to the Caribbean to serve as cheap food for the labor. Mangoes, bread, fruit, all of those things have high starch, high sugar content. That was cheap food to provide nourishment for slaves. 

As for cyanotypes, one of my early jobs was at the Getty and I had never seen a cyanotype before. They had an exhibition of Ann Atkins’ work, and that’s how I found out what a cyanotype was. I had been making these sugar bottles and a photographer friend in LA told me, you should try doing this process where you expose the object to the sun using an emulsion. He showed me how to do the cyanotypes. He thought it would be cool to see what would happen if the light transferred to the sugar bottles. I always kept it in my mind as a possible process to use as I’m really into exploring what you can do with various materials and pushing it to the limit.

I sat on the material for a while. I was pregnant, I didn’t want to use any chemicals. It wasn’t until later I thought about it being a good representation, and thought of marrying the Lionfish with the process. It’s all very much involving water. Then looking at the history of how cyanotypes were used, and they were used to make blueprints. From there, also thinking about the planning and the effort that went into colonizing spaces. It felt like it all married together in one weirdly neat package, which I wasn’t expecting. 

From there, I just started playing and I’ve been doing it ever since. A lot of it is exploration and failure, and playing with the failure, running with it, and seeing what else I can do. I feel failure is a strong learning vehicle. I would make cyanotypes that would be complete disasters, or I would spill water on it while the chemical was wet. Then you end up with various markings that you didn’t anticipate. When you’re seeing what happens, you’re like, well, now let me try to manipulate this my own way with the mistake. That’s how I approach it and in general my practice. 

“A lot of it is exploration and failure, and playing with the failure, running with it, and seeing what else I can do,”

Andrea Chung

Embracing the Materiality of Sugar in Art

WW: As sugar is a principal motif of the transatlantic slave trade, what do you see as inherent or discovered in its materiality that has lent itself so well to your personal artistry?

AC: That it can’t be controlled. I think that was something that it took a very long time for me to learn. I was trying to take this very organic material and force it to do what I wanted to do instead of embracing the material for what it is. I was trying to preserve these sugar bottles without it melting and falling apart, and then had to learn how to embrace the fact that it does melt. It really influenced the ephemerality in all of my work now. Everything that I use now is ephemeral and has its own lifespan, its own history, which is something that I have grown to love. You have to go of the control. That’s where the accepting of mistakes comes through. I started letting the sugar just melt and let it do what it wants to do. 

Even with the cyanotypes, they’re ephemeral in a way. If you expose them to the sun for too long, they’ll turn white. But you can also take that and then put it in a dark space for a while, and then the image will represent itself. I find that really interesting, that they have their own lifespan, they have their own history. One of the things I always hope for is that anyone who wants to be a collector, who wants to buy a work, they’re willing to live with the changes and the history of that work. For the duration of you owning it, it’s going to constantly change. I have pieces where the sugar is constantly falling off over time. You get to live that. You get to witness the change. 

“One of the things I always hope for is that anyone who wants to be a collector, who wants to buy a work, they’re willing to live with the changes and the history of that work,”

Andrea Chung

Inspired by Poetry and the In-Betweenness of Time

WW: “Between Too Late and Too Early” is the stirring title of your fall exhibition at MOCA North Miami, seemingly alluding to an interlude of time that can be both haunting and transformational. When does a project’s title first reveal itself to you, and how would you describe the meaning for you behind this endeavor’s title?

AC: I absolutely hate titling things, to have to come up with something that sounds poetic. I’m not a poetic person. It’s always funny to me when I see artists make these flowery titles. I always have to look to poetry or somebody else’s writing because I’m not I am not a wordsmith. I was reading Saidiya Hartman and I felt that the phrase that she used made me think about this idea of always being in between two places, or in between two worlds. To me, that resonated, because even though I’m making work about the past, I do think that you can still see how it very much informs the present. It also makes you think about what the future is going to be or what it could look like. It’s interesting that you say that it’s haunting. I do think that maybe it’s haunting in a good or bad way. Who is it haunting? I do hope that people approach it that way. That’s nice to know that it does have that effect. 

The in-betweenness, I talk a lot about breaking time in certain ways and thinking about things like Black American vernacular. The way that we speak oftentimes does break time. An example is like the habitual “be.” As in, I be going to the store. That has no sense of actual time in it because you could be going to the store in the future, or it’s something that you’re generally doing in the past, or something that you’re about to do. There’s no sense of past, present or future in it. Unless you are familiar with that sort of language structure, then you may not understand the way that we are moving through space. That’s something I think about a lot, especially with some of the newer works that are in the show. 

There’s a poet from Trinidad. I just gave a title to the museum for a piece that’s there and I had to pull it from her book. I feel others are gifted in ways that I am not gifted. I think language needs to be very concise and to find the right word choice is very challenging. Other people do it better than me, so I’d rather pull from their work and appreciate their work in that way. I’m really research based too, I’m constantly reading various books. I always say that I read people’s dissertations for fun because I’m kind of a nerd. Whenever I find something that really resonates with me, I try to write it down in my sketchbook and hold on to it because it feels like it belongs to something—I just don’t know what yet. 

“Whenever I find something that really resonates with me, I try to write it down in my sketchbook and hold on to it because it feels like it belongs to something—I just don’t know what yet,”

Andrea Chung

Constantly Learning New Ways of Making Art

WW: Here you offer an impressive presentation of over 80 mixed media works, with sculptures, collages, and works on paper juxtaposed alongside a new installation. What is your creative process like, moving from one mode of work to another?

AC: I become bored very easily. Every time I do a project I try to think about what material would be ideal to fit into the concept, to be able to illustrate the story that I’m thinking about telling. Within my practice, for myself, in order to continue making it fun, because I could easily just repeat the same formulaic work over and over again, which I don’t like seeing in other people’s work, I try to teach myself something new for each body of work that I’m doing. 

I didn’t know how to make cyanotypes. Someone taught me how to do it. I had to teach myself how to make a dark room and go through the process of doing that. With the sugar, I had to get a recipe from a dessert chef, and from there just experiment and see what I could do with it. With beading I had to go to YouTube University and teach myself how to bead. I like that I do challenge myself in that way because it gives me another tool in the toolbox. Like I said, I started off as a painter, but I had friends who showed me little bits and pieces of how to make sculpture. That’s kind of how I’ve moved along with my practice, to constantly find new ways of making to keep myself really interested and engaged in the work. 

YouTube university is a really good tool. It’s incredible. If there’s anything you want to learn how to do, you can just Google it. It’ll come up on YouTube and the range of things that you can find there is amazing. I always think people look down on self-taught artists. But really that’s what being an artist is, that you’re constantly having to teach yourself new ways of making. Some people have the formal training of going to an art school and for others you have to discover it on your own. To me it’s pretty much the same.

“That’s what being an artist is, that you’re constantly having to teach yourself new ways of making,”

Andrea Chung

Imbuing New Works with Past Revelations 

WW: How did you conceive of the way in which the artworks would be visually displayed within the gallery space, are you guiding visitors on a sort of thematic path or leaving it up to their spontaneous emotions and inclinations? 

AC: I think because the work is kind of hopping from one material to the next that they were trying to find a thematic way to have the viewer come into this space. I always think that some of the work may feel disjointed in certain ways because of the material, the presentation, the process. I think that the way that they’re presenting it, they’re trying to show the links between the various bodies of work. 

When you first walk in, there’s going to be really large cyanotypes on display, but they’re also going to have an installation that I made a while back of sugar boats that are going to melt over the duration of the exhibition. It is very much in line with the thought of the lionfish representing colonization and this idea of the blueprint in order to export all of these particular goods like sugar, coffee, those kinds of things, into different locations. It also talks about migration in different ways. I think by putting them together in ways that I’ve never shown the work before, I’m hoping that people can make those connections with the two bodies of work. 

I always go back and revisit older work, try to find what worked, and imbue ideas from it within the new work that I make. I’ll get stuck and I’ll have to go back and revisit my work and say, no, wait, what was successful about this? What didn’t work, what was the failure? Then try to take that successful idea and see how I can imbue it into the next body of work and hope that you see that they do belong together, even if they visually don’t look the same or aesthetically don’t look the same. 

“I always go back and revisit older work, try to find what worked, and imbue ideas from it within the new work that I make,”

Andrea Chung

Thinking About the Power of the Human Senses 

WW: In one of the most profound elements of your exhibition, bottles of sugar containing notes of apology pay homage to mothers who committed infanticide, refusing to allow their children to become enslaved. How is scent and the powerful memories and sensations it evokes an integral aspect of the show as an evolving live performance?

AC: Earlier in my work, I was really into foodways. I think it was another step from looking at sugar, looking at spices, and how other countries were colonized for various things like tea, salt, cloves, those kinds of things. I really got into looking at foodways, looking at things that are brought along when you move people from one location to the next. You have these traditions that come with these individuals that you don’t necessarily think of. 

A prime example would be curry. Curry in Jamaica is very different from Curry in India, very different from Curry that’s in Thailand. I started making these sculptures where I took very traditional Jamaican recipes and broke them down by ingredients, and then stacked them on each other. So when you walked into this space, particularly if you were somebody that is Caribbean or if you’re familiar with the culture, you would smell the entire dish and it would bring back memories of who cooked it for you the first time you had it, those kinds of things. 

That’s when I realized the power of thinking about your other senses as opposed to just thinking about viewing something. I wanted to try to evoke emotions just from the scent. I think that sugar can be seductive in a certain way because you’re thinking about how sweet and delicious it can be. But to me, I see it more as a drug. It’s one of the most addictive things. I’m thinking about the mundaneness of it but how many people’s lives have changed over the course of that. I think the smell helps with that seductive nature. I’ve had people try to eat my sculptures. It’s the smell of it and also visually it draws people in, to where they would actually want to do that.

“I wanted to try to evoke emotions just from the scent,”

Andrea Chung

I like to play with the senses aside from just sound or visually seeing things. I want to find other ways to stimulate memories—and scent is a really powerful one. I’d love to continue to play with that. One day I’m going to make something with sugar and put a nasty taste into it [laughs]. I would love to see what their response would be. 

Also thinking in terms of consumption, for one of the events that the museum is doing, I was trying to get them to actually get lionfish. In the Caribbean they say do your civic duty and eat a Lionfish, because they are such an invasive species. I thought it would be interesting if people came into this space, and if they’re serving hors d’oeuvres that they’re serving Lionfish, thinking about the consumption of what they were eating married with was on the walls, and the conversation between that. Something like fried fish to me is delicious and the smell of it is really kind of intoxicating. To have someone ingest something and then think about the impact, I think it would be fascinating to see what their response would be. 

“To have someone ingest something and then think about the impact, I think it would be fascinating to see what their response would be,”

Andrea Chung

The other thing is that sugar is in everything. There’s no escaping it. If you were to buy bread, there’s tons of sugar in it. It becomes, how do you limit this from your diet because it is so incredibly addictive. One of the things that I read when doing research is that the average person in England consumes 40 lbs of sugar a year, they’re so addicted to it that people’s teeth were rotting. I can’t imagine that kind of craving for sugar in that way. It’s amazing that your desire and your addiction can really change the face of the world. 

The mundaneness of certain things like salt and sugar, or even bananas. Why are we able to get bananas in the winter time and whose labor went into that, and how did they suffer from that? I want people to really think about the impact of the things that you take for granted, or even that you’re ingesting. Especially living in a, I hate the term first world, but living in such a rich country, I think people take it for granted how easy it is to to get something, and not think about the labor and the production that goes into that, and the impact that has on the world.