While in art school in London, Su Yu-Xin calculated that most painters used one of five brands of high-end oil paint, and that each brand produced only about 60 colors.
“That’s really scary,” the Slade graduate said. “It’s like all the top chefs in the world shop from the same grocery store.”
Determined not to be limited to the colors available on the market, Su began experimenting with making her own paints, many sourced from natural materials she collected herself. A decade later, creating her own pigments has become a central part of her work, and the histories of the materials she uses are part of each painting she creates.
In her Los Angeles studio, Su now has at least 200 different pigments made from stones, minerals, shells and earth samples collected from across the American west, as well from locations around the Pacific rim. She grinds these materials into the paints she uses for her luminous, swirling landscapes, images of coastal highways in Taiwan, beaches in California, volcanic eruptions in Washington and simmering hot springs in Japan.
The 33-year-old is having her first solo museum show in the US this spring, at the Orange County Museum of Art. On a recent afternoon, Su gave the Guardian a tour of her studio, in a light-filled former furniture factory in LA’s arts district, and showed us her meticulously organized shelves of pigment materials. The jars of bright powders, and drawers of rocks, shells and minerals, are also a map of her influences and her adventures, which stretch around the world.
There is Taiwanese sulfur, from the town where her father grew up. Azurite from Hunan, China, “the main blue color for thousands of years used in Chinese paintings”, which she contrasted to “the famous ultramarine blue that’s used in medieval western oil painting”.
And then there are the more recent stones she has collected, on her trips to historic locations across the American west. Su is interested in materials that come with their own deep histories, and that has led her into an unexpected American subculture, one very different from her art school networks from the UK and Taiwan. In the US, the painter has become a “rock hound”.
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Today, Su welcomes visitors to her Los Angeles studio with a brisk “shoes off, please”. Sunlight streams through high windows on to old wooden floors, and big canvases of works in progress lean up against the walls. Su does not use paint on rectangles: her canvases are uniquely curved, and sometimes propped up against gallery walls on handcrafted stands that look like weathered wood or stones.
On a studio wall next to the door, there’s a vast landscape of a road winding through caverns along the seacoast. It looks, at first glance, like an image of California’s Highway 1, perhaps of a beautiful stretch near Big Sur. But Su explains it’s actually an image of the coastline on the opposite side of the Pacific: not the west coast of the US, but the east coast of Taiwan.
Su’s work is full of these kinds of mirrorings – visual and geographical connections that show the long interplay of trade and culture around the Pacific.
Her tall white shelves of pigments and pigment materials are part science laboratory, part work of art in themselves. She has drawers of carefully organized rocks and crystals, and jars of ground pigments labeled with their materials, and where and the year when they were collected.
Su’s choice to make her own pigments is rooted in her early training in Chinese ink painting in Taiwan. Back then, when students arrived at the studio, “you take off your shoes, and then grind your ink. And we did that every day fresh,” she said. The ink, made with animal hide glue, would go bad quickly, so it couldn’t be used the next day. “There was this kind of ritual to it.”
She sees her use of color as deeply grounded in the geography of her youth – something she did not realize until her time in London, where she trained in western oil painting techniques. “All my classmates were like, ‘Your usage of your palettes is very vibrant,” Su recalled.
“If you live where I grew up, which is subtropical, you don’t see so many shadows. The sun is directly hitting the ground. You see vibrant color, in food, in houses and in signage,” she said. “And I felt that was not just a choice, not just a celebration of the form. It’s actually what we see. If you are closer to the equator, you see stronger color.
“I wonder, growing up around the Pacific, if there is a type of geological DNA that’s imprinted in the landscape, that people thought was stylization, but it actually wasn’t – it was like a pinpoint of where you are.”
Here in the American west, in contrast, “everything’s so dry and crisp”, she said. “[Georgia] O’Keeffe – she painted the mountains so sharp, and that’s because there’s no water in the air, so you get to see really far.”
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Su is interested in the geopolitics of color itself, and the ways that the history of geography, trade, government and empire shape the fundamental building blocks of artists’ craft.
In England, certain famous paint shades are inseparable from the history of empire, like JMW Turner’s “Indian Yellow”, made from the urine of cows in India that were only fed mango leaves, or “Mummy Brown”, made from ground-up human remains.
In Taiwan, the white paint Su used when she studied Chinese painting was made from powdered Japanese oyster shells. She would learn later that students in mainland China tended to use lead white paint, not the gofun white she always used. “The Chinese painting in Taiwan has this huge influence by Japan because they colonized us for 50 years,” she said. “[The pigments] are all white, but if you look into the DNA of it, it tells you more than artists want to tell you.”
The United States, where Su has lived for two years, is a more challenging place to collect natural painting materials than other countries. In Shanghai, she would simply take her backpack and a trowel to a local park in the evening, and fill it with dirt to make into pigment. But in the US, she said, much of the land is private, and national parks don’t allow digging for rocks and minerals. Americans can also be aggressive in protecting their private property. “So I have to figure out what’s the zone that I can do what I do, and not get shot,” Su said.
On land that falls under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, “you’re allowed to collect 25 pounds a day in one spot, which is plenty”, Su said. But much of her stone harvesting ends up being from a patchwork of privately owned mines across the west, which allow visitors to dig up a small quantity of stones for a flat fee.
Most of these mines have websites, and she can set up a visit over email. The mine owners tend to be interesting characters, she said. She met a 70-year-old man who owns a blueberry azurite mine and lives in a cabin he built on his own land. Another mine owner took her and her partner camping up on the remote ridge where his mine is located. He works there many days a year, mining rare minerals by hand.
To research where to go, Su has joined gem and mineral enthusiast societies, gone on group expeditions and learned from retired geologists, many of whom have worked for mining companies for decades. She and her partner are usually the only Asian people on these adventures, Su said. But the quirky characters she has met across the west also defy simple stereotypes. The people who stake a claim and own small private mines tend to be college-educated, she said, since it takes a lot of geologic knowledge to understand where to mine.
One of the most historically resonant California mines she’s visited is the Pala Chief mine near San Diego, which she believes was a source of the California tourmaline that Tiffany & Co sold to China’s Empress Dowager Cixi, who amassed a large collection of the gems.
Cixi “believed like Chinese people generally believe that tourmaline, this mineral, has the power of purifying and then getting rid of the bad energy”, Su said. The empress, who ruled during the final years of the Qing dynasty, faced huge geopolitical pressures, Su said, and she channeled some of that struggle into an obsessive collection of gems and minerals.
Today, it’s possible to pay a fee and visit the Pala Chief mine to collect a day’s worth of tourmaline and other minerals, which Su has done. She brings a pick and a bucket, and a mine representative accompanies her into the mine.
The Pala Chief tourmaline she obtained is of relatively low quality, compared with the rare watermelon tourmaline Tiffany sold to Empress Cixi. But for Su, the San Diego tourmaline still carries the intertwined Pacific history of California mining, the last imperial dynasty of China, and the Chinese belief in the spiritual properties of gems and crystals that she sees as influencing the popularity of crystals in California today.
The way that Su works these historically significant pigments into her art is not always literal. The tourmaline did not become, for instance, a portrait of Empress Cixi, or an illustration of the mine itself. Instead, Su ground the Pala Chief tourmaline into powder and used it to paint the ocean on a huge landscape of the California coastline called Bone Caves. It’s a soothing image of waves and bone-like shells, with the Pacific Ocean as the connector between so many different eras and empires. The white pigment in the painting, she said, was made from bleached coral, “the coral skeletons created through global warming”.
Other times, though, Su makes more straightforward connections. A recent painting of an ongoing underground fire in a Utah coal seam uses paint made from coal, sulfur and also from cinnabar, another “toxic fiery material” that people in imperial China had used to create a medicine they hoped would make them immortal, but that instead poisoned them.
Su has also repeatedly painted Mount St Helens, an active volcano in the Pacific north-west. One of the pigments that she uses is helenite, pieces of green glass made by humans from the volcanic dust from Mount St Helens’s eruptions. Helenite, first created by accident, has become a popular material for jewellery and souvenirs. Su buys bags of it and grinds it up.
“I love this commodification,” she said. “Because if you look at it under a microscope, it’s glass. But through marketing and different crystallization formation, it became something much more valuable. And now it’s powder again.”
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Some of her materials are soft enough to be ground and mixed by hand in the studio. Others require the use of a big, noisy machine, the kind used to grind materials for ceramic glazes. The transformation from raw rock to paint often requires many steps. Dirt has to be sifted out and the material purified. A chunk of Chinese azurite, for instance, has greens, blues and yellows mixed together, which Su first has to carefully separate out.
One of her favorite natural materials from California is mica. “After you grind it, it becomes a shimmer that people use in eyeshadow. There’s something very gentle about it. If you’re applying makeup, or you’re coloring things, it’s an act of care, and making things better. And the mica itself is also so flaky – it’s not aggressive.”
But she also often paints with sulfur, a pigment with a more dangerous edge. “It’s one of the brightest natural yellows that I can get, so I love using it,” Su said of the flammable material that reeks of rotten eggs. “And every time I use it, it’s like the studio smells so funny. The painting smells so funny. And it’s kind of combustible, too.”
Su has ground up pearls to make white paint, and even used diamond powder, the kind sold to polish metal. The diamond powder is probably “the most expensive” material she has used: a few grams cost about $50, though she also uses silver and copper. Her pigment collection includes a meteorite that her friend gave her, and pale pigments made from cowrie shells, which were once used as currency.
On her travels, Su has made it through customs in the airports with some very weird materials in her bag. One of the strangest in recent memories is a collection of plastic water bottles filled with mineral-infused water from the different Japanese baths she visited.
However, her most precious pigments are not the most expensive ones, but the most difficult to obtain, like the sequence of pastel colors ground from shells she picked up on the beach in Taiwan – shells that she has realized are becoming increasingly rare.
Other paint sources have more playful histories: one of her favorite sources of California dirt for earth-based pigments is on the San Andreas fault near Palm Springs, close to where one of the Star Wars movies was filmed.
Su used this earth to demonstrate how she makes her paints, pouring out the cleaned and purified California dirt on to the glass-topped cart she uses to mix her pigments, then adding in walnut oil.
“You add the oil in gradually – look, the color just became much more intense,” she said, grinding the powder and the oil together. “You have to have oil wrap around every single particle so the painting will age well.”
Using natural materials as pigments can create issues for a painting over time, Su says. Colors can fade, or even change, from exposure to sunlight or from oxidation. But unlike the artists who see their work as a way to preserve images of youth and beauty from inevitable decay, Su is curious, even open, to the ways the environment may affect her paintings over time.
“When I think what happens to paintings nowadays – you don’t know, 300 years later, what’s in the air,” she said. “It’s really interesting: climate change and paint. What will happen there?
“I don’t know why I like that,” she said. “It’s something bigger than you, you know?”
Su Yu-Xin’s OCMA exhibition, Searching the Sky for Gold, is on view through 25 May at the Orange County Museum of Art
The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent.
This article was amended on 5 May 2025 to correct the spelling of Georgia O’Keeffe’s surname. It was also amended on 7 May 2025 to say that Su Yu-Xin used glue made of animal hide, not hair, as was previously stated.
