Interviewed by Gabriella Angeleti

“We have many words for air: cloud, fog, mist, vapour and smoke. The name shifts as the air itself changes, yet these transitions are rarely abrupt. The sky is an intricate mixture of powder, dust and molecules, much of which goes unnamed. These in-between states of air are like colours on a canvas that lack names—alive, nuanced and elusive. Painting is uniquely suited to house these air phenomena, because painting itself is made of particles. Pigments, suspended and floating, eventually fossilise into an image.”

Matt Stromberg

For Su Yu-Xin, pigment is more than just color. The Taiwanese-born painter makes her own pigments from natural materials – stones, shells, minerals, flora, and fauna – through which she traces histories of colonialism and migration, of geology and tectonics. The narratives behind the colors in her landscape paintings, depicting bucolic beaches or volatile volcanoes, are as multilayered as the hues themselves.