In her solo exhibition, Between Too Late and Too Early, at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Andrea Chung presents a powerful investigation of motherhood, the Atlantic slave trade and the legacies of commerce and labour. Drawing inspiration from these histories and her own Chinese, Jamaican and Trinidadian heritage, Chung uses her practice to understand the past while imagining new futures, including the Afrofuturist notion of Drexciya, an underwater world filled with children saved from enslavement by their mothers who threw them overboard.
Between Too Late and Too Early showcases several bodies of Chung’s work, including collages on paper made from birthing cloths, lithographs and cyanotypes. The show also features a site-specific installation consisting of bottles made of sugar, an ephemeral material that is melting over the course of the exhibition. Speaking from a makeshift studio in Miami where she was cooking the last of the sugar to finish this work, Chung discussed her vision for the show and her hopes for viewers’ experiences.
Between Too Late and Too Early showcases several bodies of Chung’s work, including collages on paper made from birthing cloths, lithographs and cyanotypes
Zachary Balber
The Art Newspaper: How did you come up with the title Between Too Late and Too Early?
Andrea Chung: It’s a quote from an essay by Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, about Venus as an image of the enslaved woman and her presence in the narrative of the slave trade. I’ve been thinking about breaking time and how Black people move in a space that can’t always be defined by time. A prime example is the Black vernacular of the use of the word “be”, which could be past, present and future, as in: “Who be eating cookies? Cookie Monster be eating cookies.” There’s time that you have to be part of that culture to understand the time and context. I thought that Saidiya’s quote better articulated that.
The show includes installations made from sugar. How did you start using sugar?
I first started using sugar in grad school around 2007. I’d started off as a painter and made portraits of my family to try to understand why they ended up in Jamaica from China. Chung wasn’t a common name in the Caribbean back then. A lot of foods that were brought to the Caribbean to feed enslaved people—mango and coconut—are not native to the area and are full of sugar. Diabetes runs in my family, and my grandmother died getting her second leg amputated from gangrene. It felt like the right material to tell the story of my family in that region.
The show includes The Wailing Room (2024), a work consisting of bottles made of sugar that contain apology notes from mothers who committed infanticide rather than see their children become slaves
Zachary Balber
The show features a new, site-specific commission, The Wailing Room (2024), consisting of bottles made of sugar. How did you develop it?
It reimagines an older bottle work I did that looks at Mauritius, a former sugar colony in the Indian Ocean. I was fascinated with some of their trade dying out. With these works, I’m considering Drexciya and mothers who committed infanticide on slave ships instead of giving birth to lives that would be enslaved. For this iteration, I added apology notes from the mothers to their children inside the bottles to get viewers to think about what would cause a mother to have to make that decision.
That’s really heartbreaking and timely.
I didn’t intend for the project to be in the backdrop of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but I want people to think about the desperation of the decision. What would cause a mother to throw herself or her child overboard? A lot of enslaved women were charged with murder, but if they’re not legally viewed as a human being, how can it be murder? It was seen as destruction of property. If anything, it was mercy.
The sugar will melt over the course of the show. Is it hard to give up control of the materials?
I had to lean into the loss of control. It’s the same with the cyanotypes, like the immersive installation that feels like you’re underwater. I can try to plan as best I can for the image to come out, but I have to embrace what the material itself does. Cyanotypes will fade and can be brought back, but even when there’s no image visible, the image is still there. Its history is still there, and it’s still in the sugar when it melts.
With sugar, I’m drawn to the ephemerality of the material and that the work has its own lifespan, so it can’t be commodified. I feel strange making something extremely personal or talking about trauma, and then thinking that it could go up for auction or be bought and resold.
Did you write the notes inside the bottles, or are they from other sources?
I wrote some, but others are from Beloved by Toni Morrison, which was based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her child to save her from enslavement. I also used historical texts on Margaret from newspaper reports on the incident. The installation is heavy with emotion. There’s also a sound component that switches from laughing to crying and you can’t discern which it is. Someone asked how I can make this work and not become depressed, but I don’t feel shame in what someone else forced us to do.
- Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, until 6 April 2025