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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 — through 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 With out the Solar #3 (Coastal Highway on the East Facet of Taiwan)” and “Salt Caves (California Shoreline)” (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 one of the vital treacherous transit routes on this planet, Su and lots of others proceed to make use of the highway often, as it’s the solely route into the town. The crumbling caves alongside this highway are the ruins of pathways Indigenous Taiwanese laborers constructed at nice danger to their lives throughout Japanese and Qing Dynasty colonial rule. Then again, “Salt Caves” mirror pure sea caves which can be 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.
Different works, akin to “A Blue-and-Inexperienced Panorama 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 traditional Chinese painting. 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 inexperienced [lu] are now not two forms of shade to be layered and utilized, like an adornment on a bone; they’re the skeleton, consciously refracting gentle and dividing area, displaying how language and visible expertise transfer in lockstep.”
Elsewhere, “A Detonation, and the Time It Spent with the World (Atomic Bomb Take a look at, New Mexico)” captures the world’s first nuclear bomb within the New Mexican desert. The rectangular canvas is dropped at life in fiery crimson shades from cinnabar, a powdered mercury sulfide utilized in Chinese language artwork for hundreds 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 without end 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 think about pigments past their typical CMYK framework and redirect focus to the primordial codes of the land.
Su Yu-Xin: Searching the Sky for Gold continues at Orange County Museum of Artwork (3333 Avenue of the Arts Costa Mesa, California) via Might 25. The exhibition was curated by Ziying Duan with help from Courtenay Finn, Albert Lopez, and the whole OCMA workers.
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