Su Su: Seeing, Being

The works of the New York painter Su Su seem fully and even peacefully composed, but beneath the surface they are also crying out for a bit of decryption. And it’s not a simple task to unravel the painting practice of the artist, born in China and now a Brooklyn resident. Her works recall so many things: the Asian landscape tradition, Renaissance tapestries, French Impressionism, halftone screen-printing, digital pixelation and rasterization all at once. Does her work look backwards or forwards? Is her idiosyncratic affect—both left-brained and right-brained, adult and childlike—rad or trad? Am I even asking the right questions?

One reason it’s hard to know how to begin is that if you are starting in front, you are already lost. That is because Su Su paints back to front, literally using an array of special tools like syringes, palette knives and her own fingernails to press, feed and force pure jots of pigment through the silk canvas from behind. The result is part Georges Seurat or Sigmar Polke canvas, part 1970s color television and part hooked rug.

This is not process painting for its own sake. Su Su uses these special techniques not to spotlight the way she works or the materiality of paint interacting with canvas. The method is about exactitude. There is a board in her studio studded with little balls of yarn, each made of two colors knotted together. They look like toys, but they’re actually a mixing guide—demonstrations of how two colors as different as magenta and green can in tiny amounts read as gray or brown or lavender. But while this technical process requires the vigilant care and steady hands of a conservator, it has a playful, nostalgic quality that takes her back to her childhood. Then, a bowl of rice was not only an afternoon snack, it was a medium for imagining strange miniature landscapes. One of her new works in the show, Rice Landscape is a direct homage to that.

And this is just the back of the painting. The front is another story altogether. Su Su’s images don’t display any obvious connection to her special pointillism process—not the way that, say, Color Field painters drew attention to the way they stained the canvas instead of painting. But Su Su’s visions are rooted less in technique than in the assembled, curated reality that every artist creates for themselves—and which in turn creates them. 

In Su Su’s case, that reality includes the urban mêlée of shoppers and hagglers on Canal Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown.  A Seurat-ific view of people sitting on a waterfront lawn in Williamsburg during the golden hour, gazing at a summer sunset. An octagonal self-portrait, her hair set in a geometric cascade of spheres, set against a deep sky-blue background, intimate, innocent, yet shield-like. A Monet-style view of a rustic Japanese-style bridge in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that layers different cultures, centuries and styles of landscape painting into a single whole, without erasing the noise. 

She has painted another Asian-American crossover—the serene white Moon Bridge over the lotus pond in the Chinese Garden at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. And it might be this idea—romantic and familiar enough to be a banal picture-postcard, yet also intensely personal too—that might be one of the clearest keys to Su Su’s aesthetic persona. That is because at any given moment, she is traversing and architecting multiple bridges to create not just her art but her self—crossing between past and the present, “the East” and “the West,” the imagined and the concrete, stereotype and authorship.

And, of course, between the inside and the outside. In the final reckoning, the back and front of a Su Su painting not only connect but integrate, buffer and stream. The same way the cryptic inner construction of an intricately hand-sewn dress produces its flawless outer image, a unique set of memories, goals, fears and dreams comes together to produce one specific person. A Su Su painting is an analog of a Su Su day spent being Su Su. It’s a reflection, a blueprint, a mosaic, a tapestry. It might look confusing on the inside, but rendered in oil on silk, it hangs together beautifully. It’s a little strand of DNA, if DNA meant Do Not Adjust. 

– David Colman