MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present “The Revenant”, a dual-artist exhibition of Shen Xin and Su Yu-Xin in the Galleries section of Frieze Los Angeles 2024, featuring their signature paintings and installations. It will showcase the artists’ pressing concern as to how the interaction between nature and humans — particularly, different ethnic and/or gender groups — may become the starting point of our far-reaching reflections and actions.

With their installation, paintings, and publications, Shen Xin seeks to create affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities. In Four Tracks, a webpage-based installation, four groups of Chinese railroad workers are gathered from across different lands and epochs. The workers wonder which group brought the mosquitoes, though they slowly realize no one is to blame; mosquitoes inhabit all the lands they arrived from. Those from the past raise their voices, while those from the present are silenced.

Meanwhile, in Shen’s latest oil paintings, the energy of what’s perceived as connections of the interspecies existence, is borrowed to portray the creation of an image. The creation of each painting, born out of animistic understandings of the image — the concentration of magic, preserves traces of collective stories we inhabit, so that they can be told again. Stories of dying, nursing, capturing, landing, slicing and eating, are some of the branches that compose together the ecosystem of what wants to be told.

Shen Xin will also debut WINDE, their latest co-publication with Ali Van, which consists of poems and paintings born out of land based practices between life partners. Nestled between peat and peregrine, AX Archive, co-created by Ali and Xin, finds convergence in a foregathering of essential rhythms and returns. Through in-place research, it engages practices for cooking, painting, performance, poetry, printing, and sound, with motion to record in contract with relational learning. WINDE is supported by MadeIn Gallery.

Connecting her experience of identity politics between Taiwan and Los Angeles, Su Yu-Xin’s mixed-media landscapes bear witness to the history of exchange between cultures and nature and project the painter’s role through wars and migrations, territorial invasions and restitutions, as well as the exploitation of pigments and their trade. She collects, studies, and processes the color substances scattered on the earth’s crust and then invents a new order on the painting surface through drawing, compression, and accumulation.

In her large-scale paintings on view at Frieze Los Angeles, the artist reflects on two localities of significance that respectively rest on the west and east coast of the Pacific Ocean: one is the Su’ao-Hualien Roadway in Taiwan, and the other is the Central Pacific Railroad in the American West. Her landscape painting is a geological practice of rearranging plants, minerals, organic and synthetic matters, connecting and recollecting localities across continents that bear the weight of individual and collective memories.

Through such an integration of boundary-crossing poetics, language performativity, and pigment politics, both artists bring our attention to the imperative calling of language, race, and ecology, thus investigating how art can be reconstrued as a vital mediating force in society.