Afterstone: Su Yu-Xin
4 May - 12 July 2026
  • Albion Jeune is pleased to present Afterstone, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Su Yu-Xin (b. 1991, Hualien). Afterstone explores how histories of geography, trade, and empire are embedded within the raw materials artists use, viewing colour and pigment through a geopolitical lens. Yu-Xin seamlessly adopts long-standing material traditions for an uncannily prescient purpose, commenting on the present-day geopolitical dynamics of the Pacific region and beyond. 
     
    Yu-Xin's Afterstone features nineteen new paintings, all presented in Venice for the first time. The paintings include one large-scale installation scroll measuring three and a half meters in length. Yu-Xin's works explore the movements of people and materials by looking back at historical forms of trade and exchange across oceans. Yu-Xin's works advance her use of self-created pigments further. The large three-dimensional scroll and other new works are painted with hand-ground pigments derived from minerals, soils, and natural sediments collected from various coasts across the Pacific. Through the layered composition of these pigments, Yu-Xin reconstructs two intimately familiar shorelines from her own life: the eastern coast of Hualien, Taiwan, where she grew up, and the California coast, where she now lives.  
  • Each scene is deeply influenced by Yu-Xin’s dedicated practice of hand-grinding pigments from both organic and inorganic materials. The artist...
    Each scene is deeply influenced by Yu-Xin’s dedicated practice of hand-grinding pigments from both organic and inorganic materials. The artist is fascinated by alchemy, specifically exploring the parallels and departures between Western and Chinese alchemical traditions. Both lineages seek to break down raw materials in pursuit of their "truest form," and both identify the final stage of alchemy as a settled state. Afterstone mirrors this progression within its physical layout. The first room of the exhibition adopts a chaotic, restless pace that eventually settles into a new type of fossil and pigment in the final room. In this concluding space, recognizable shells, snails, and items of personal memory are drawn out, moving the show from a dynamic mood toward a settled state, in a rhythmic and intentional fashion. 
     

    Albion Jeune is committed to supporting Yu-Xin's practice, which is rooted in the geopolitics of colour. Consequently, the decision to show Yu-Xin's work in Venice imbues the exhibition with a site-specific resonance that truly explores the full extent of Yu-Xin's practice. Carefully crafted wooden panels provide the platform on which Yu-Xin's methodical painterly process transposes pigment into image. Venice, once a key intermediary in the early exchanges between East Asia and Europe, becomes in this exhibition a witness, a site where stories of extraction and trade are explored. The exhibition draws inspiration from Venice’s importance as a centre of alchemical practice during the Renaissance. Similarly the legacy of Marco Polo’s journey is felt in Yu-Xin's new body of work, tracing the historic routes through which pigments and cultural materials travelled between China and Europe. Aligning with the 61st Venice Biennale, Su Yu-Xin's Afterstone will present a vital dialogue on materiality and migration at a crucial moment in the contemporary art calendar.  

     

  • Afterstone opens at a period of great significance for Su Yu-Xin, following her debut London solo exhibition, Precious, in 2024, and her solo show at the Orange County Museum of Art in January 2025. Furthermore, Yu-Xin recently saw published her first monograph alongside Albion Jeune, a work that documents her practice with great eloquence. In 2027, Su Yu-Xin will be exhibiting her work in a major institutional solo show in Southeast Asia. 

  • Su Yu-Xin (b. 1991, Hualien) considers painting as a place where multiple disciplines and various perceptual capacities intersect. Painters have...

    Su Yu-Xin (b. 1991, Hualien) considers painting as 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. Hence, paintings bear witness to the history of the exchange between cultures and nature and project the painter's role through wars and migrations; they manifest territorial invasions, restitutions, the exploitation of pigments and their trades. While the history of painting often emphasizes the stylistic evolution of image production, the technology of colour pigments also evolves contemporaneously. Su Yu-Xin collects, studies, and processes these color substances scattered on the earth's crust. From there, she invents a new order on the painting surface through drawing, compression, and accumulation. For her, such landscape painting is a geological practice of rearranging plants, minerals, organic and synthetic matters. 

     

    Su Yu-Xin holds an MFA degree from Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and a BA in Ink Painting from Taipei National University of Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at OCMA, USA (2025); Albion Jeune, UK (2024), Longlati Foundation, Shanghai (2023); List Art Fair Basel, Online (2020); and KuanDu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei (2019). Su has shown internationally in numerous group exhibitions including at Gagosian, Hong Kong (2023); Blum & Poe, Tokyo (2023); Beijing Biennial 2022, Beijing; Perrotin, Shanghai (2023); UCCA Dune, Beidaihe, (2021-2022); UCCA, Beijing (2020); and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2018), among others. In 2020, Su received the Huayu Youth Award Nomination, China.  

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