Su Su is an Chinese American artist, born into a traditional Manchurian clan family in Beijing, and currently lives and works in New York.
Artist Statement
Su Su is a Chinese American artist of Manchu heritage, born in Beijing and based in New York. Working primarily in oil painting, she explores perception as fluid and unfixed, shaped by experience and cultural context. Through the physical behavior of paint, she uses color as material to construct shifting fields of image and atmosphere.
In her paintings on silk, Su Su has developed a reverse painting process in which oil paint is applied from both sides of synthetic silk. Gravity, permeability, and the resistance of the material shape the image, while gradations of color generate light, depth, and bodily volume. Color functions simultaneously as image and matter, atmosphere and physical substance.
The paintings shift with distance: forms that appear coherent from afar disperse at close range into stains, layers of pigment, and the structure of the silk. Moving between recognition and abstraction, surface and depth, the works resist a fixed image or singular way of seeing.
Across silk, linen, paper, and fresco, Su Su explores how material and process shape an image. Her practice brings Chinese ink painting and ideographic traditions into dialogue with fresco and sfumato, tracing affinities between distinct histories and methods of making and seeing.
Susu received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, where she also served as a professor of painting in the School of Drama from 2015 to 2021.
Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville), the de la Cruz Collection (Miami), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the Momentary (Bentonville), Muskegon Museum of Art (Michigan), See World Art and Culture Center (Shenzhen), and the Chautauqua Institution of Visual Arts (New York), among others.
Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of Hort Family Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the de la Cruz Collection, the Lunar Codex project (NASA, Moon), and the Bennett Collection of Women Figurative Realists, among others.
Press
Conversation-Presented by Falcon collective NY. “R U Still Painting”, Host: Massimiliano Gioni, Panelist: Robert Storr, Adrianne Rubenstain, Austin Lee, Elizabeth Neel, Jason Fox, Su Su, Sam Barski.
Featured work-"Wonder Woman: Art of the Asian Diapora", Publisher: Rizzoli, Text by Kathy Huang, Contributions by Aleesa Pichamarn Alexander, Genny Lim, Delia Cai, Kavin Kwan, and Faiha Roisin. 2025
Featured work "Making Strides", Muskegon Museum of Art, Museum Magazine, 2025
Interview-Su Su in conversation with Lucy Liu, Civil Art Publishing, Civil Art, NY, 2025
Featured artwork-The Bennet Prize for Female Figurative Artist, ArtForum Magazine, 2024
Conversation- Meet the Artist Su Su, Studio Incamminati, School for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2023
Video interview-Su Su Talks About Her Creative Process, short video screening, Andy Warhol Museum, 2022
Online Interview Forum 83 - "Counterpressures: Meet the artist: Su Su", Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2022
Online interview-"Portraiture, Identity and Pandemic" conversation with Susu and Yi Cao, International Chinese Fine Arts Council, 2021
Conversation- Meet the Artist, De La Cruz Collection, Miami, 2021
Featured work by Su Su, State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2020
Article- An interview with Susu, Fred Blauth, The RIB, 2018
Article- Su Su's Surreal Distorted Paintings Analyze the Politics of Presentation Through Imagined Worlds, Juxtapoz, 2018
Article-Su Su: Recent Paintings, ARTPULSE magazine, 2016