Los Angeles–based artist Su Yu-Xin (b. 1991, Hualien, Taiwan) transforms natural and synthetic materials into pigments, using these colored substances as both the medium for paintings and the focus of her research. Driven by a profound interest in the materiality of color, she examines how pigments are extracted from the Earth’s crust through processes like mining, grinding, and refining, and how color is attributed as a property based on the physical sources from which it derives. She challenges modern color systems by investigating aspects they often overlook—the origins, functions, migrations, and potential futures of color.

 

Searching the Sky for Gold, Su’s first solo museum exhibition outside Asia, explores amorphous and seemingly invisible substances that have colored, tangible foundations: salt air along the California coastline, hot springs in Japanese onsen, underground mine fires in Utah, smog in Chinese mountains, volcanic dust over the Pacific Ocean, and nuclear gases in New Mexico. The atmosphere in her work is not a void but a gaseous mixture of smoke, sulfides, volatiles, and flammable substances, evoking both wonder and risk. Presenting a body of new work for OCMA, Su presents landscapes as dynamic, interconnected realms, offering us a novel way to understand the world we inhabit.

 

Su Yu-Xin: Searching the Sky for Gold is organized by Ziying Duan, Assistant Curator, Orange County Museum of Art.