CARLOS HERNANDEZ/COURTESY OF PROJECT FOR EMPTY SPACE
Photos in Andrea Chung’s exhibition “The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears,” at Project for Empty Space in Newark, are framed in sugar.
Certain sheets of hard candy are indistinguishable from glass. Add some impurities, or food coloring, and you might feel yourself in the presence of a jewel. It seems almost unfair that sugar should also possess crystalline beauty on top of its other intoxicating qualities, but you don’t need a sweet tooth to see that it does. Its sturdiness and translucency are boons to architecturally minded confectioners — and sugar has inspired a few concept-driven visual artists, too.
The most prominent candy-spinner in New Jersey galleries these days is Andrea Chung, artist in residence at Project for Empty Space. The Project has given her their new-ish art space in the Ironside Newark building (111 Edison Place) to do with as she wishes, and she has iced it thoroughly. In “The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears,” an installation that will be up for most of the summer, she embeds photographs of family members in frames made of pure sugar.
CARLOS HERNANDEZ/COURTESY OF PROJECT FOR EMPTY SPACE
A photo in “The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears.”
These are no narrow strips of sweetener she is working with. Chung’s sugar borders are as thick as Renaissance frames, and they are often just as textured. She has allowed her material to melt and become mottled, yellowed and pockmarked, as candy sometimes does when it is left exposed to the elements. Fragments of frame fall off and collect on the floor beneath the photographs. The top layer of sugar liquefies and drips, molasses-like, across the images. Artists often push toward an aesthetic interaction between the frame and the framed object. Rarely is that aim made quite as visible, or literal, as it is here.
Those pools of sticky residue, yellow smears, and rough, gummy surfaces aren’t always pleasant for us to look at. Chung doesn’t mean them to be. The artist’s view of sugar is a vexed one: She clearly respects its power and its protean qualities, but she also wants to remind us of the ways in which the history of this commodity is bound up in international exploitation, colonization and the slave trade. Sugar, for Chung, is desirable, but it is also highly corrosive. It degrades spectacularly, leaving stains wherever it drips, fusing photographs to frames, and threatening to blot out the faces it touches.
This wouldn’t work as well as it does if Chung’s family wasn’t likable. Luckily, they are. The artist opens the scrapbook to show us people of ordinary but indisputable beauty: on vacation, at weddings, graduating from school, posing blithely under the sun. One reproduces an ultrasound of a “miracle baby.” Fashions and hairstyles suggest that some of them are very old indeed, while others are more recently taken. Gaps in the frames honor people lost, or perhaps just forgotten.
The rough chronological sequence of the photographs testifies, as old photos often do, to the Chung family story, including migration to the United States, deep roots in the Caribbean, accommodation to custom and habit, periods of sickness and health, and subtle but unmistakable signs of resistance. It is likely that you, or your parents, have a drawerful of photographs like this — an archive, a chronicle of milestones, at once an archetypal American story and a tale that is specific to you and your kin.
Chung lets the sugar fall on all of it. Bronzed drippings stop just short of the white borders of certain photos and pool up in droplets between the shots. Some suggest sweat, some tears, some tropical rainfall. In a few of the 24 pieces, brown parallel lines of caramelized color streak straight over the faces of the Chung family, imprisoning them behind candy bars. The symbolism isn’t subtle. These people are framed, and stained, by the properties of the commodity that defined the experience of the New World for Chung’s ancestors.
To make its points, “The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears” employs a couple of narrative techniques that we have encountered in galleries lately. We have seen our share of old photographs in unusual frames, and images of ancestors, or ancestor spirits, placed by the artist in visible peril. Lance Weiler, for instance, asked us to rummage through his father’s photo-choked desk in a replica of his childhood home in the fire-obsessed “Where There’s Smoke” at ArtYard in Frenchtown in 2023.
CARLOS HERNANDEZ/COURTESY OF PROJECT FOR EMPTY SPACE
Photos in “The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears.”
It is an expedient way to generate sympathy for the creator and the creator’s concerns. At its best, it draws the viewer deeper into the show as she recognizes her own concerns and experiences reflected in the faces of people who aren’t so different from her. But it also feels like an emotional shortcut — part of the memoir-ization of modern storytelling, and the conviction, held by many modern artists across disciplines, that their personal history has universal dimensions.
Other recent art shows have asked to look hard at the physical products of coerced labor. Danielle Scott has confronted us with clutches of cotton in her sculptures and a wall-full of washboards. Anthony E. Boone made aesthetic use of old rail spikes. Adebunmi Gbadebo saturated rice paper with indigo dye, and asked us to see agricultural crops — and even the color blue — in the context of enslavement. The strategy of these shows is similar: The artists are calling attention to things we interact with every day and reminding us that these materials didn’t come from nowhere. In “Ocean,” Andrea Chung asks us to subject sugar to the same kind of scrutiny.
She’s got a conceptual advantage that her peers don’t. We are already deeply suspicious of sugar. It is directly linked to obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, and immunosuppression. Cotton and indigo aren’t physically addictive, but there is good evidence that sugar is. As much as we love it, we are ready to see it as trouble. In one of the more recent frames, a hollowed-out space meant for a photograph is labeled “COVID.” Did our sugar-heavy diet cost Chung one of her relatives? Did a demon once let loose in the cane fields take away one of yours?
As on-the-nose as this show can be, Chung doesn’t try to answer that question. She simply presents the family history in the context of extractive agriculture, and lets you draw your own conclusions. The Chung ancestors left the Caribbean, but the social conditions created by the industry have continued to gum up the relationships between these people. Sugar frames degrade before our eyes, but the sugar parameters remain intact.
CARLOS HERNANDEZ/COURTESY OF PROJECT FOR EMPTY SPACE
Fragments of a broken frame in “The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears.”
Well, most of them do. In the most dramatic gesture of a dramatic exhibition, Chung allows one of her sugar sculptures to fall from the wall and break into fragments. The splinters of sugar retain the general shape of a frame, but the photographs are gone. The implications are clear. In a gallery corner in Downtown Newark, a few of these people have slipped the bonds of the material and, in a shattering act that feels like an overthrow, stepped clear of the gooey stuff that confined them.
Is Chung one of them? It’s hard not to think she’d like to be. But chances are, her fingers are still pretty sticky.
Project for Empty Space will present Andrea Chung’s “The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears” through Aug. 17. Visit projectforemptyspace.org.
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