LOS ANGELES — For Su Yu-Xin, a Los Angeles-based painter born in Taiwan, pigments are metonyms for the earth. Su’s present exhibition, Looking out the Sky for Gold on the Orange County Museum of Artwork, challenges shade’s typical monikers and representations whereas uncovering the politics of notion. The paints in these works are drawn from minerals and powders she collected from volcanic soil, pure clay, or the discarded exoskeletons of ocean creatures alongside mountains and shores. As such, her research-based work shut the hole between subject material and materials by depicting pure phenomena — violent volcanic eruptions, tranquil rain falling throughout a storm — by way of the pure and artificial parts that comprise them.
Su’s inclination to attract from uncooked materials stems from her coaching in conventional Chinese language ink portray and Japanese Nihonga, which make use of pure minerals as pigments. Curator Ziying Duan’s pairings reveal the connections between the transitory scapes created with these paints throughout borders. For instance, “With or Without the Sun #3 (Coastal Road on the East Side of Taiwan)” and “Salt Caves (California Coastline)” (all works 2024) depict the man-made caves of Su’s hometown on Taiwan’s japanese Suhua Freeway and the naturally carved salt caves of Los Angeles, the place she now lives.
Though Suhua Freeway’s lack of guardrails and steep drop-off to the Pacific Ocean makes it some of the treacherous transit routes on this planet, Su and plenty of others proceed to make use of the street incessantly, as it’s the solely route into town. The crumbling caves alongside this street are the ruins of pathways Indigenous Taiwanese laborers constructed at nice danger to their lives throughout Japanese and Qing Dynasty colonial rule. Alternatively, “Salt Caves” mirror pure sea caves which are slowly eroded by salt over time. The ensuing architectural feat naturally frames the Pacific shoreline, making a portal that extends past the ocean, connecting it to Taiwan. Concurrently, these works illustrate how landscapes intrinsically evolve over time alongside or regardless of human industrialization.
Element of Su Yu- Xin, “A Blue-and-Green Landscape in Rain” (2024), azurite, pink coral (Tubipora musical), conch shell, sulfur, ilmenite, inexperienced soil, honey, yellow ochre, kaolin clay, and different handmade pigments on flax stretched over wood body
Different works, similar to “A Blue-and-Green Landscape in Rain,” convey a way of sluggish, peaceable motion as clouds enclose a rain-soaked mountain. The inexperienced and blue palette is impressed by the Chinese language shade qinglu — blue-green — utilized in conventional Chinese language portray. These artists utilized mineral and botanic pigments with medicinal properties to convey a way of therapeutic inside depictions of Buddhist and Daoist paradises. Works like this additional Su’s long-running investigations: In her 2020 essay, “A Color Study Leading Towards Materialism,” as an illustration, she writes about qinglu’s fixed state of flux in saturation, or chroma, and brightness all through historical past: “qing and green [lu] are no longer two types of color to be layered and applied, like an adornment on a bone; they are the skeleton, consciously refracting light and dividing space, showing how language and visual experience move in lockstep.”
Elsewhere, “A Detonation, and the Time It Spent with the World (Atomic Bomb Test, New Mexico)” captures the world’s first nuclear bomb within the New Mexican desert. The rectangular canvas is dropped at life in fiery purple shades from cinnabar, a powdered mercury sulfide utilized in Chinese language artwork for 1000’s of years, and a vibrant orange-yellow from realgar, a poisonous arsenic sulfide mineral. The work captures a second that human eyes couldn’t understand, rendered with flammable and toxic minerals replicating the situations of a second that ceaselessly modified our planet and humanity.
Altogether, Looking out the Sky for Gold explores how pure geological occasions and industrial revolutions spotlight an evolving narrative of fabric migration and shared historical past. The works ponder shade previous to technological shifts, encouraging us to contemplate pigments past their typical CMYK framework and redirect focus to the primordial codes of the land.
Su Yu-Xin, “With or Without the Sun #3 (Coastal Road on the East Side of Taiwan)” (2024), hematite, purple shale, halloysitum rubrum, iwa-enogu, snail shells, inexperienced soil, opriment, soil, purple agate, malachite, and different handmade pigments on flax stretched over wood body
Su Yu-Xin, “Noon Break (Mount Merapi)” (2024), sulfur, soil, bleached coral bone, blue coral (Heliopora coerulea), halloysitum rubrum, and different handmade pigments on flax stretched over wood body
Set up view of Su Yu-Xin, “Salt Caves (California Coastline)” (2024), rock salt, sulfur, obsidian, hematite, iwa-enogu, pyrite, inexperienced soil, gofun, ochre, basalt, and different handmade pigments on flax stretched over wood body
Su Yu-Xin, “The Map of Mine and Other Things” (2024), pure copper, chalcopyrite, azurite, pure silver, blue coral (Heliopora coerulea), malachite, gofun, copper oxide, soil, acrylic paint, and different handmade pigments on hand-shaped wooden
Su Yu-Xin: Looking out the Sky for Gold continues at Orange County Museum of Artwork (3333 Avenue of the Arts Costa Mesa, California) via Could 25. The exhibition was curated by Ziying Duan with help from Courtenay Finn, Albert Lopez, and your complete OCMA employees.
