The oscillation between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, the tension between the grotesque and the beautiful
A Conversation between Angela Su and Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM): As with nations and all kinds of social systems, epidemics are not only shaped by biological and medical conditions, but by the way politicians, the media and populations describe their origins, development and historical meanings. Diseases are framed by discourses about race, modernization and even the relationship between people, the earth and the cosmos, to a point in which social reactions and our health policies are also defined by the claims we make on the causes, origins and agents of transmission of a disease. As we are witnessing now, once again, epidemics and pandemics are narrated in terms of the alleged threat of the other and the attempt to define culprits and victims. Nonetheless, this is a particularly specialized field of contemporary social research, a particularly sophisticated way of understanding the relationship between nature and culture. How did you get interested in the phenomenon of “outbreak narratives” and finally decide to embark on Cosmic Call, produced for the Contagious Cities project?
Angela Su (AS): One of the greatest challenges of Contagious Cities was having to deal with the vast amount of information about epidemics. It was a tremendous task to narrow down my research. Should I investigate one particular germ or epidemic outbreak? Should I research the possible root causes of an outbreak… deforestation, rapid urban development, uneven population distribution, industrial farming and animal health? And how about the overuse of antibiotics, climate change and the development of bioweapons? Should I also talk about the human condition… fear and compassion, discrimination, paranoia, death and survival? What about disease control policies, surveillance and border control? I wanted to cover everything, because I see all these topics as being linked to each other. It’s difficult to talk about one without mentioning the others.
When I talked to my friends about the project, what struck me the most were their reactions. Some of them would say that yes, of course, Hong Kong is indeed “contagious” as we have been an exporter of infectious diseases, most notably the 1894 bubonic plague and SARS. Other friends were shocked by the title of the project, as it stigmatizes certain cities and peoples as “contagious.” So I wanted to find out what it really means to be “contagious.” Is it socially constructed through discourse? Why do certain diseases, such as Ebola, AIDS and SARS, capture our imagination more than, for example, smallpox, cholera or even the 1918 flu pandemic?
Then I came across Priscilla Wald’s book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham University Press, 2008).
This particular narrative is like a detective story which includes the emergence of a mysterious disease (usually from the Third World: China, Africa), scenes of international cooperation and the triumph of medical science. Emerging together with the advancement of bacteriology in the 1800s, this narrative has slowly become dominant through its circulation in novels, films, news media and scientific journals. However, we have to also bear in mind that while this narrative is not inaccurate, it does give us the impression that certain locales and certain cultures are contagious. It also fails to convey the complexities behind a disease outbreak.
There are also studies on the different narratives adopted by China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan during the SARS outbreak. The impact of these different narratives did affect the kinds of actions taken by civilians.
And that’s how I decided to embark on creating my own narrative, hoping to reveal the complexities behind a disease outbreak.
CM: It is likely that very few people in the contemporary art audience, especially in Latin America, are aware of the significance of the Wellcome Institute that commissioned your piece. Part of the wealth of the most important pharmaceutical magnate at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Sir Henry Wellcome, came to build the most important collection of documents and artifacts on the history of medicine and the human body, today forming the bulk of the medical collections at the British Museum and the Science Museum in London, as well as the most important library and archive on the subject, the Wellcome Institute. Doing research at the Wellcome Library on Euston Road is a dream come true, starting with the way the books, stored in a beautiful classical oval rotunda, are organized according to illness, allowing you to browse the entire history of culture on the basis of illness taxonomy. What was your experience working at the Wellcome Institute? Did you start your research with an entirely free plan, or were you originally focused on looking for materials on Traditional Chinese Medicine?
AS: Working with Wellcome was the most wonderful experience. I was given a lot of artistic freedom and the staff was immensely helpful and knowledgeable.
Before visiting the collection, I had the idea of focusing on Traditional Chinese Medicine, so when I arrived, the librarians had already prepared a display of rare books, prints and artifacts related to my research. In fact, Wellcome’s art collection contains more than 250 000 prints, drawings, paintings and photographs. The digital collection that you see online represents only a small percentage of the whole collection, which is housed in the basement of the Wellcome building. I was fortunate enough to have been given a tour of some of these fantastic rare prints. The Wellcome Library is also a marvelous resource center. Not only do they have materials on medical science, they also have books about the occult, witchcraft, zombies, quackery and alternative medicine. As I was also interested in the theory of panspermia, the staff immediately directed me towards the correspondence between the scientists Carl Sagan and Francis Crick, who hypothesized that life on Earth may have been seeded by other civilizations from outer space. I would say that the open-mindedness of the institution is definitely reflected in this fascinating and eclectic collection.
CM: One aspect that stands out in your film is your concern with the way, under the current Chinese administration and its alleged affiliation with ancient cultural roots, traditional medicine and philosophy are being entirely transformed. You seem to suggest the colonization of concepts such as chi or techniques like acupuncture, which are about to become mere technical means, streamlined to serve the nationalist narratives of the People’s Republic of China. Would you care to expand on this issue, on the way so-called ancient wisdom is producing a strange marriage of technique and ideology?
AS: What we understand today as ancient wisdom has gone through years of evolution and manipulation. The way Chinese medicine was practiced in ancient times is very different from how it is practiced nowadays.
Since the 1920s, there has been a gradual scientification of Chinese medicine. Classical Chinese medicine has been slowly standardized, universalized and institutionalized into what we now call TCM, which stands for Traditional Chinese Medicine, a name designed for foreign consumption. Since then, TCM became highly politicized; it’s integral to state formation and nation-building in China. And in purging “unscientific” medical practices, standardization also screens out age-old methods that are actually effective. TCM today represents the integration of Chinese and Western medicine, a soft power weapon to be exported to promote national identity. The traditional method of individualized treatment with slow-acting remedies often gives way to the quick relief offered by Western medical treatment, even though the treatment is still branded as “traditional.”
Moreover, since the philosophy of classical Chinese medicine is based on metaphorical theories rather than empirical studies, its language or rhetoric can be easily manipulated. Take acupuncture for example: in the 1940s, during the Chinese Civil War, the military and political vocabularies which corresponded to the revolutionary ideal were used to describe the body. Acupuncture points were arranged in straight lines, resembling an army’s front lines. The body was described as a complete, unified entity characterized by a division of labor and leadership. The comparisons between the brain (the Central Committee) and its links to the different systems of the body (the different ministries) via the nerves (party members) conveniently show that a direct image of the Chinese Communist Party had been superimposed on Chinese medicine. In short, Chinese medicine in modern China has been shaped by party criteria, wartime conditions and the practicalities of healing.
Curiously, Chinese medicine in Hong Kong is very different from TCM in China. In fact, it is closer to the original practice and let’s hope it won’t be re-scripted by the Chinese Communist Party in the future.
CM: Cosmic Call is characterized by a narrative full of twists and turns, which, seen in retrospect, creates a prodigious chain of signifiers and stories. There is a constant test of the viewer’s credulity, along with a particular satisfaction in taking our imagination to places we would not have imagined beforehand. How did you arrive at the idea of such a twisted plot? Is it related to the feeble condition of truth in contemporary society, or does it have to do with your aesthetic leanings, in terms of an artistic program?
AS: Before the Contagious Cities project, I came across some fascinating images of comets in The Augsburg Book of Miracles, a collection of 16th Century illustrated manuscripts. I knew all along that I wanted to incorporate these images. Then I read about the theory of panspermia in a book about epidemics… one thing led to another, and gradually the story took shape.
The ideas came naturally. The more I read about a topic, the easier it gets to connect the dots. For some bizarre reason, I always romanticize the fact that people suffering from schizophrenia have the talent to crack codes and to see connections between things. On the other hand, I am also aware that, if you want to find connections, you will always find them. Coincidence exists in minute details and, unfortunately, coincidence feeds conspiracy.
There is a noteworthy subplot in Cosmic Call regarding bioweapons… In 1894, the Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburo, who studied under the renowned German microbiologist Robert Koch, travelled to Hong Kong during the plague outbreak and identified the plague bacillus. Forty years later, in 1941, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of Japan’s Kwantung Army, better known as Unit 731, spread plague-infected fleas among Chinese cities. That same year, Dr. Enryo Hojo of Unit 731 reached out to the Robert Koch Institute and gave a lecture about bioweapons at the military academy in Berlin. The bioweapon institute headed by the Nazi scientist Kurt Blome is actually known to be very similar in design to Unit 731’s facilities in Manchuria. Rumor has it that, after World War II, the United States used data obtained from Unit 731 for its own biowarfare research program. In 2003, there were speculations that SARS could have been a bioweapon against China, developed in the US. Today, it is speculated that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon created in China, but funded by the US.
I guess there are always mysteries that we can never solve, and we have to be vigilant about rumors, as they are often used by the authorities to divert attention from the real issues at hand.
CM: I guess it would be fair to say that contemporary culture suffers from a plague of conspiracy theories and a yearning for prophecy. Cosmic Call is woven with a chain of unproven secrets and eventually leads to some sort of myth of super-humanity. Beyond these thematic interests, it feels as if its concerns predate the current COVID-19 outbreak, and the centrality of its Chinese origins in the many outbreak narratives being developed by both the media and politicians around the world. It would seem to me that you got trapped in the spider web of your own fantasy: how can one address the way making art becomes entangled with history, to the point of being visionary?
AS: Now that you’ve mentioned it, Cosmic Call does feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether or not something is prophetic can only be said in hindsight. If there was no COVID-19, Cosmic Call would just be a work that questions the dominant narrative—all in all, a regular research-based video. It reminds me of the fine line between prophecy and paranoia. I would say that the relevance of Cosmic Call is the result of timing (that’s probably why no prophecies come with a clear timeframe for fulfillment) and that the “prophecy” is really a logical deduction based on my research.
Cosmic Call was never meant to prophesize a future epidemic originating in China (nor to imply other threats from China), it’s more like a warning about the high possibility of disease outbreaks, given that Hong Kong is a densely-populated international port in close proximity to China, a country with questionable public health regulations. And knowing that everything that brings us together as a civilization—human interactions, progress, migration and globalization—is what makes us vulnerable to epidemic outbreaks, it was very safe to deduce that, sooner or later, there would be a pandemic.
I am not sure how to address how art-making predicts its own significance. Perhaps we should address why history is doomed to repeat itself? As suggested previously, I am interested in conspiracy theories, but I do agree that we have been drowned in conspiracies over the past 10 years because of politics, social media and disinformation. Conspiracies and rumors are dangerous, especially when they are circulated by the state’s propaganda machine. However, I would like to think that the way I piece together different facts is more like what Agent Mulder does in The X-Files. I am simply looking for answers, trying to make sense of this crazy world with the hope of finding a way out of this senseless cycle of repetition.
CM: The final scenes of the film are fascinating: a gothic performance in which viruses are posited as a means of personal transformation. I am very impressed by the way you mixed science fiction and medical fantasies, creating an ambivalent view of the constantly mutating and biologically invasive condition of our bodies. Can you speak about your fantasy? How did you develop the collage between pseudo-documentary and performance art that defines this work?
AS: I’ve always been interested in old medical illustrations. For some obscure reasons, I find peering deep into the body very titillating. Perhaps it spawned from a mix of the desire for knowledge, the visceral response to the seduction of the flesh and the fascination with the monstrous body undergoing constant transformation. I also like the idea of the flayed body, where the chaotic, messy interior breaks free from the boundary of the skin. It is immensely sexual and seductive, or maybe it’s my death drive.
David Cronenberg’s early body horror films had a particularly big impact on me, as he mixed horror and medical fantasies to create something that is spine-chilling and eerily disturbing. His first feature film, Stereo (1969), is a black-and-white, low-budget pseudo-documentary with a voiceover from a scientist who conducts telepathy experiments. It reminds me of the ephemeral films of the 1940s and 50s. By today’s standards, some of these educational films are hilarious and absurd; on the other hand, they did convey what were perceived to be “facts” or “truths” at the time they were made. The same also goes for old medical illustrations: what was perceived as scientific was actually an artist’s interpretation. I guess I have always been fascinated by the oscillation between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, the tension between the grotesque and the beautiful.
What I presented in Cosmic Call is mostly true, the only imaginary aspects are Comet Aureus and how Comet Aureus links the different facts together, so the audience will always question what is real. There was a funny anecdote… a journalist from a local newspaper described the film as a real documentary and the accompanying art pieces as historical artifacts. I think the work is successful in this context. For the performance, it is my way of coming to terms with the paradox of epidemics and technology. It feels necessary to have some sort of conclusion or reconciliation after going through such a convoluted journey. The questions I asked myself were… Do I accept the inevitable? Do I become one with the universe?
Resist or be assimilated?
