- By Caroline Lenher
In her American debut, Su Yu-Xin brings her unique style to the Orange County Museum of Art. The Taiwanese-born artist considers painting “a place where multiple disciplines and various perceptual capacities intersect. Painters have always played a vital role in the visual art industry, and the medium of painting reflects the discovery and re-invention of the material world.”
Her vision is expressed through transforming natural and synthetic materials into pigments. As the artist explores and discovers these materials, they become both the medium for her paintings and the focus of her research. Yu-Xin has a deep interest in the materiality of color, exploring how pigments are obtained from the Earth’s crust through processes such as mining, grinding, and refining. She also examines how color is identified as a property based on the physical origins of the pigments. She challenges modern color systems by investigating aspects such as the origins, functions, migrations, and potential futures of color.
In her Searching the Sky for Gold, Yu-Xin explores amorphous and seemingly invisible substances with colored, tangible foundations. Examples include salt air along the California coastline, underground mine fires in Utah, smog in Chinese mountains, and nuclear gases in New Mexico.
At OCMA, the artist presents landscapes as dynamic, interconnected realms, offering visitors a novel way to understand our world.
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