The Orange County Museum of Art’s (OCMA) new exhibit, “Searching the Sky for Gold” by Su Yu-Xin, is a vibrant exploration of natural materials and landscape paintings.
Premiered at OCMA for the first time on January 31, 2025, “Searching the Sky for Gold” is Su Yu-Xin’s first solo show, according to the official OCMA website. In this exhibition, Su uses substances found on the earth’s crust to create her own pigments for these paintings. She views painting as a place where multiple disciplines can intersect, creating harmonious yet unique works of art.
In a discussion about the creation of these pigments, Su told The Art Newspaper, “I was trained in Chinese ink painting, where grinding one’s own ink and preparing fresh animal glue is common… There are maybe three or four companies in the world that produce artist-grade oil paints. Realizing [sic] that almost every painter is working with the same selection of colours [sic] felt strange—like everyone cooking with the same limited set of ingredients. I wanted to see how far I could go with it.”
The exhibit features large, rounded wooden planks with colorful paintings of various natural features, including mines in Utah, mountains in China, and the California coastline. With vibrant colors and flowing shapes that dominate the exhibition, Su creates a distinctly natural feeling that evokes a dissonance of the real and surreal. All of Su’s works here are done on canvas with rounded edges. Su’s unique approach to the medium of the canvas creates an immediately disarming environment within the exhibition, stripping away the preconceptions of the outside world, leaving only her message: vibrant and clear, an invitation to engage, a direct conversation between artist and witness.
In addition to the many works hanging along the gallery walls, additional pieces are resting on the ground, while others are propped up by rounded wooden legs, mimicking the layering processes of the very materials Su uses. Through this layering, the audience becomes the artist, the miner, the excavator, digging through textures and materials, searching for the heart of it all. Using her handmade pigments, Su invites us to interrogate the very origins of color, color as a natural property, color as an unrefined resource, a byproduct of the earth we survive on.
But “Searching the Sky for Gold” is just as interested in the immaterial as it is in the material. Su uses this exhibition to also explore the visual effects of fog, air, and mist, the unseen forces that govern our day-to-day lives, unconscious and ever-present.
“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 fossilize into an image,” said Su.
These fossilized images turn the invisible visible and ask us to reevaluate our relationship to the intangible. This transformation creates an exhibition that is ultimately a proud declaration of color and nature, and the ways in which they are inextricably intertwined.
The title “Searching the Sky for Gold” was inspired by the 1800s California Gold Rush and the cosmic origins of gold. It serves as a reflection of the immensity of time and space, a humbling reminder that many of the materials we have on earth used to be suspended in the sky, crashing down upon us millions of years ago. It is the unfathomability of this timeline intersected with the earthen materials grounding the artworks that creates the exhibition’s central dichotomy.
Through her works, Su offers us the opportunity to see the world anew, to connect the inevitability of the physical with the metaphysical, the present with the eternal, to realize we are all a product of mountains and rocks, water and wind, to allow us a moment of reconciliation with an ever-shifting universe within every pigment, every odd-shaped canvas, every moment of disorientation.
OCMA is free entry, meaning that it costs nothing to see this amazing exhibit. It is an unforgettable experience that makes you question the relationship between the complex earth we inhabit and the things we create. Don’t miss your chance to see “Searching the Sky for Gold” by Su Yu-Xin before it closes on May 25, 2025.
