LOS ANGELES — For Su Yu-Xin, a Los Angeles-based painter born in Taiwan, pigments are metonyms for the earth. Su’s current exhibition, Searching the Sky for Gold at the Orange County Museum of Art, challenges color’s conventional monikers and representations while uncovering the politics of perception. The paints in these works are drawn from minerals and powders she collected from volcanic soil, natural clay, or the discarded exoskeletons of ocean creatures along mountains and shores. As such, her research-based paintings close the gap between subject matter and material by depicting natural phenomena — violent volcanic eruptions, tranquil rain falling during a storm — via the natural and synthetic elements that comprise them.
Su’s inclination to draw from raw material stems from her training in traditional Chinese ink painting and Japanese Nihonga, which employ natural minerals as pigments. Curator Ziying Duan’s pairings reveal the connections between the transitory scapes created with these paints across borders. For example, “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 eastern Suhua Highway and the naturally carved salt caves of Los Angeles, where she now lives.
Although Suhua Highway’s lack of guardrails and steep drop-off to the Pacific Ocean makes it one of the most treacherous transit routes in the world, Su and many others continue to use the road frequently, as it is the only route into the city. The crumbling caves along this road are the ruins of pathways Indigenous Taiwanese laborers constructed at great risk to their lives during Japanese and Qing Dynasty colonial rule. On the other hand, “Salt Caves” reflect natural sea caves that are slowly eroded by salt over time. The resulting architectural feat naturally frames the Pacific coastline, creating a portal that extends beyond the ocean, connecting it to Taiwan. Concurrently, these works illustrate how landscapes intrinsically evolve over time alongside or despite human industrialization.
Other works, such as “A Blue-and-Green Landscape in Rain,” convey a sense of slow, peaceful movement as clouds enclose a rain-soaked mountain. The green and blue palette is inspired by the Chinese color qinglu — blue-green — used in traditional Chinese painting. These artists utilized mineral and botanic pigments with medicinal properties to convey a sense of healing within depictions of Buddhist and Daoist paradises. Works like this further Su’s long-running investigations: In her 2020 essay, “A Color Study Leading Towards Materialism,” for instance, she writes about qinglu’s constant state of flux in saturation, or chroma, and brightness throughout history: “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 in the New Mexican desert. The oblong canvas is brought to life in fiery red shades from cinnabar, a powdered mercury sulfide used in Chinese art for thousands of years, and a bright orange-yellow from realgar, a toxic arsenic sulfide mineral. The work captures a moment that human eyes could not perceive, rendered with flammable and poisonous minerals replicating the conditions of a moment that forever changed our planet and humanity.
Altogether, Searching the Sky for Gold explores how natural geological events and industrial revolutions highlight an evolving narrative of material migration and shared history. The works contemplate color prior to technological shifts, encouraging us to consider pigments beyond 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 Art (3333 Avenue of the Arts Costa Mesa, California) through May 25. The exhibition was curated by Ziying Duan with support from Courtenay Finn, Albert Lopez, and the entire OCMA staff.
