Su Yu-Xin b. 1991

In Searching the Sky for Gold, Yu-Xin 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.

Considering landscape as a medium, context-specific works by nine artists opened up new perspectives and re-examined from various angles the relationships between human and nature, and between self and world.

The works in the exhibition channel the sceneries observed both on journeys and in daily life into a larger-scale investigation of the global order of manufactured landscapes as shaped by nature, economics, culture, and politics. Through the overlapping of these landscapes and the dialogue between them, the artists attempted to reveal hidden inner connections and power games beneath the surface of our world. Participating artists included Vajiko Chachkhiani, Liu Yujia, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin, Shen Xin, Su Yu Hsin, Su Yu-Xin, Wang Wei, and Tant Zhong. This exhibition is curated by UCCA Curator Yan Fang.

Does landscape have an owner? Is it the person who owns the land itself, or the traveler who takes in the sight? As a medium, landscape is colored by mental images both immediate and remote, called up as one comprehends the world. Is the true order of the world hidden within these representations? If we understand a journey as a process of transformation in thought, then is it possible, on a trip in which one’s experience is predetermined, to move forward gradually, poetically and furtively?

From the perspective of the participating artists, landscape is no longer the environment or scene that carries certain images, behavior, or narrative in the normative sense, but rather, a particular medium that has been programmed and implicated with cultural expression and meaning. In their respective practices, the artists leave behind existing conceptual understanding of landscape and instead, draws attention to the role of “viewing” in image production through the landscape itself or images generated from landscapes. Discussing issues surrounding nature, the economy, history, society, culture, and aesthetics, the artworks interrogate from various angles the question of ownership hidden behind the construction of landscapes.