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Su Yu-Xin | Interdisciplinary Artist

Su Yu-Xin grew up on a farm on the remote east coast of Taiwan and now paints from the coast of California. Having travelled from one side of the Pacific ocean to the other, with formative years in Taipei, London, and Shanghai in between, she imbues her work with alchemy and philosophy. Capturing transformation, impermanence, and nature’s will, her work is acutely imaginative. Crafting her own pigments, going beyond what’s readily accessible to find rare minerals, she manifests the connection between reality and fiction, science and nature, the industrial and the sublime.

Image credit: Su Yu-Xin, Yubo Dong, and Albion Jeune.

How did you begin?

I lived in Shanghai for six years. I moved to China to prepare for a show but the pandemic locked me in: a blessing in disguise. I explored mainland China; the weather, the food, the cuisine, even the language is so diverse, and there are so many different landscapes. I have an interesting relationship with land and nature: the way I work with materials, the way I place unusual colour on the wrong subject matter. Water can be black, if there’s smoke in it; I’ll use smoke and ashes to paint the water..

A lot of people use mineral pigments, but there are very few people who forage their own source materials. To begin with, I read a lot. I found a couple of geologists in China. My pigments aren’t traditional colour pigments. I use gunpowder and nitrates, typically found in fertiliser. Mineral pigment has been used by every civilisation, but I also use synthetic gemstones and plastic. Charcoal is combustible, so there are laws of chemistry I have had to learn. My older sister is a bioscientist and my younger sister is a yield engineer and physicist, so they help with chemical problems.

After moving to California, this cross-disciplinary learning became easier. There are a lot of geology lovers and clubs in California enabling you to join with people from different walks of life. I’m still learning; there are endless possibilities.

The Birth of a New Color, Su Yu-Xin

How did you learn?

When I was 17, I went to Taipei to study art, and majored in Chinese ink painting. Making pigments is something I learned early on. The material system in East Asian ink painting was not as mature as Western painting. You can’t really buy ready-made paints, only basic colours and they’re not very good. The pigment that we use on silk uses a binder that is a fish or hair glue and they sour if you leave them overnight. So, if you’re a connoisseur of fine ink, you have to grind it fresh every day.

At The Slade, we learned how to make everything from scratch for oil paintings. The materials behind the image are often as important as the image itself. I saw my older training and the new one overlapping. I was exposed to different art histories, different ways of thinking, and the figures of speech around painting. This allowed me to move between two different systems: ink and mineral pigments on the one hand, and Western oil on canvas on the other.

Field trip in Aspen, Utah. Credit: Su Yu-Xin

How do you plan, prepare, and create your works?

My work consists of two intertwined parts. One is making the painting itself, the other is making the pigments. For the first part, I draw and sketch, sometimes outdoors, sometimes in the studio. Drawing is often where the earliest structure of a painting appears. It’s brainstorming on paper. For the pigments, I take field trips.

I follow places where the clues of the land and my own curiosities overlap: geological sites, coastlines, mining regions, hot springs. I collect specimens, from soils, minerals, shells, and residues. I’m a diver and the spectrum of colour you see is out of this world: the reflection of the water, the lack of oxygen, the creatures that were not made for my eyes. Out of the water, it loses its magic; it’s only glorious in its home. It’s similar with insects, because their color is, again, not meant for humans. It’s for other insects, or plants, or different kinds of spores in the air.

In the studio, I look at the drawings and the specimens together. I try to read them as a single field of information and begin grouping them into a cohesive set of ideas that might eventually become a painting or exhibition. In this way, the paintings emerge from observation and material research at the same time.

What does a typical day look like?

I arrive [at the studio] around 9am with my Pomeranian Mica (her unusual silver spots reminiscent of the sparkly mineral, ubiquitous in California). My studio is calming but exciting: I am armed with optimism, the feeling that there is still so much to do and learn. I am surrounded by hundreds of materials, all being processed at different stages.

The morning is quieter and analytical: I draw, read, write, process pigments. Each pigment is a small project, demanding its own care. Managing these materials makes the day quite full. When the painting part comes later, it is especially rewarding. I let go of the tension of research and allow the painting to move intuitively. I love to paint in the afternoon, because that’s when the light is the best. I don’t seal the pictures so a lot of the pigments shimmer differently when natural light hits them, because they’re different crystallisations of stone. That’s the magic of a painting in real life.

I work with my headphones on. I have to listen to someone talking, something that has a narrative. Maybe painting is too much like music for me.

Su Yu-Xin working in LA Studio. Credit: Su Yu-Xin.

Who or what most influences your work?

Nature’s ability to produce unexpected palettes and textures is a constant source of inspiration: the tradition of rock viewing in Chinese and Japanese cultures, where stones are appreciated as miniature worlds; the colours of the deep ocean, which have never ceased to amaze me since I started diving.

Recently, I have found inspiration in Victorian literature. Preparing a show last year at the Orange County Museum of Art, I read Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies.I found it horrifying. It was written not long after the microscope was invented; water indicates purity but with the microscope, people realised there’s decay, rot, and living things within water, and we drink it into our bodies. That’s horrifying.

Painting is a perfect medium to capture the science fiction quality of the landscape we’re experiencing; it makes you feel very, very small. That connection between reality and fiction creates tension in the painting that is very scientific.

Afterstone Exhibition, Albion Jeune, credit: Su Yu-Xin, Yubo Dong, and Albion Jeune.

You have a show in Venice, Afterstone, how did this come about?

Venice is all about material transformation. The city is built upon a lagoon with wooden piles driven into. They didn’t have the scientific knowledge to know that there’s no oxygen in the lagoon, so the wood would not rot. That’s pure luck. And, the minerals in the water seeped into the wood, and it became mineral-like. It became stone.

When we decided to do this show, my dad had just passed away. Preparing for the show was a grieving process for me. I was thinking about materials that survive their own intention. Venice is a site of alchemy: the trading, the tales that people brought; the material of the buildings: the brick and mortar made from oyster shells, harvested from the lagoon and burned. The calcium carbonate shell, created to protect the soft body inside the oyster, is now the wall of a palace.

I feel transformation and shifting of scale, especially in Venice; it happens in my paintings, again and again. When Marco Polo set out to return to Venice, he headed to Quanzhou Bay, where my ancestors are from. They use the same method, as Venice, of burning oyster shells to build on the coastline. Two disconnected civilisations came up with the same solution. I used a lot of oyster shells from that region in southern China. Venice was the trading spot between China and Europe, so it was fitting.

A contemporary maker or artist whose work excites you?

In Venice, I saw paintings by Victor Man. Somehow, without anything sparkly, the palette he used reminds you of butterfly wings glowing in the dark. He used this uncanny green and blue pigment, so thickly, that it created a luminosity from within the canvas.

I also saw the Michael Armitage show. His painting felt liberating. I use a Chinese calligraphy brush to paint, and the construction of the brush allows you to direct a mark a long way without dripping down. He uses those marks too. His paintings are enormous, so you can imagine how he moves around when he paints, and it’s full of life and movement. It makes you want to paint.

Another craft or technique you admire?

I collect calligraphy brushes so when I travel to Japan I visit those tiny villages. Last year, I visited Onta, a pottery village with fewer than one hundred people remaining. Every summer, they harvest the clay from the mountain, purify it as a village, and divide it into nine portions. Each household gets one portion, each has their own signature technique, within the pottery style of the village. For hundreds of years, they have made this one thing and no one else knows more about this clay than they do. This local hands-on knowledge is irreplaceable.

Interview by Leo Gilmour

Images from Su Yu-Xin, Yubo Dong, and Albion Jeune