Afterstone: Su Yu-Xin

If Cloud Casting is borrowed from the land, then Jewels and Bones #3 (2026) is largely borrowed from the sea: ‘Green soil, glauconite, sea urchin test (skeleton), lepidolite, muscovite, pearl powder, iwa-enogu, Crinoidea fossils (sea lilies and feather stars fossils), ochre, purple varnish clam (Nuttallia obscurata), tube coral (Tubipora musica), ceramic fragments, and other handmade pigments’. Which you, could believe, might not be far off the list of exhibits in a marine biology or paleoceanography display. But this too is part of the play Su sets in motion. The materials are both true to what they are and transformed, allowing each work to be both a story of endurance and emergence. Which might be one way of reading the title of this exhibition: Afterstone. At times the provenance of the materials Su harnesses to make her paintings seem to generate their subject (as in The Birth of a New Color); at other times a more straightforward interpretative narrative takes over (Day for Night, 2026, for example). The point perhaps is that neither process is the only way through which to read Su’s work. It admits both and plays with that.

False Weather on the Moon (2026), for example, comprises a series of rounded curves against a reddish background. The painting came about when the artist tried to imagine the landscape on the moon, a landscape that exists in a place with no atmosphere. “It means it doesn’t have wind,” the artist explains. “If it doesn’t have wind, you don’t see any rounded rocks on the moon. Everything is sharp like a blade. That’s a fascinating landscape to imagine because we never experienced anything like that.” If that feels like a contradiction to all the rounded forms, then the iron oxide that provides the reddish colour is a similar hint at something the moon does not have – an oxygenated atmosphere.

But it’s true too that the Earth itself is playing this game even before Su’s interventions. As she points out, salt crystals are what’s left of the vaporised water of the oceans, just as sea shells are formed by the extraction of calcium and carbonates from the water surrounding a soft-bodied organism. And then those shells themselves are later harvested and repurposed in the building materials of cities such as Venice, which protect the soft bodies of humans. It’s a cycle of reuse or reincarnation that’s both potentially endless and intricately, if temporarily, linked to human circulation via processes of migration or trade. We of course, are made of these minerals just as is everything else.

Su’s work is a play with the balance of certainty and uncertainty, assertion and denial. Grounding that is the notion that a painting’s contents can be reduced to a list of its contents versus the idea that a painting communicates something that cannot be listed or verbalised. And that’s a dynamic that might, in turn, speak to the identitarianism and identity politics of our current age. In which the relative ease and often unpleasant necessity of global migration have produced a more diverse planet, at the same time as our national and nationalist politics are dictating one that is ever more segregated. People are being told they don’t fit in or belong. It’s a factor that’s not lost on the artist herself, a migrant and a traveller, who concedes that one way of looking at her work is as a search for roots. “I think the reason I started to work this way, a lot of that came from the fact that I want to know what am I made of. I think it’s comforting to find order in chaos. Because I think that’s how people find the way to relate to each other.” For all the overt emphasis on rocks and minerals, the root of this art is human too. In the mix of cultural traditions of East and West, the code switches from fact to fiction and from the painterly to the sculptural are excavations that consistently suggest that we are part of, not apart from, this Earth.