Katherine Qiyu Su’s Fiery Abstract Paintings Remix Her Memories

Three years before she began working on One Hundred and Twenty Seconds (2024), Katherine Qiyu Su snapped a film photograph of flowers resting on her grandmother’s deathbed. It was hard, initially, to address the pain of her grief that this image evoked. But now, the artist has decided to work with her memories head-on—the sorrowful and the joyous—in her enigmatic, abstract paintings.

A 2023 graduate from the Royal College of Art, Su lives and works in London, where her career has been steadily growing. After several group exhibitions at European spaces such as Ojiri Gallery in London and Alessandro Albanese Gallery in Milan, Su presented her inaugural solo exhibition in New York, “How Far is the Foreign Lands,” at Half Gallery this April. Now, she has won the Artsy Foundations Prize as part of its summer 2024 edition, at which London’s Wilder Gallery showed her work. As the winner, her sweeping, ethereal paintings will be featured on a billboard in Times Square from August 12th through 25th. She will also be making her Armory Show debut with Half Gallery later this fall.

Su views her abstract work as a tactile exploration of emotions and memory, aiming “to chop them up and reconstruct them until the forms are almost unrecognizable,” she told Artsy on a call from her Brixton studio. Moments from the past, film photos, and raw emotions guide Su as she approaches her blank linen canvases. Many of her paintings start with charcoal sketches based on elements of her daily life—in London or Beijing—that she then covers up with swaths of bright paint. “Looking through my own memory leads me to pursue my practice—going through those memories and trying to place those fragments together,” Su said.

Her fluid, abstract works evoke this newfound sentimentality, where forms swirl and clash, symbolizing her attempt to visualize specific moments. In April in Whose Sharp Fires Our World Shall Burn (2024), an explosive painting with fiery reds and blues bursting from the center, she cloaks any recognizable forms with these energetic swirls and brushstrokes, in shapes that resemble birds’ feathers, fish scales, and floral patterns.

Born in Beijing in 1999, Su first began making art at age five or six when she started drawing lessons. Her parents encouraged her to focus on more traditionally “sensible” subjects like mathematics, so Su compromised, graduating with a BA in interior design from North China University of Technology. When the artist decided to pursue painting instead, this education would come to inform her work, particularly in how she perceives space. Even in her most frenetic works, such as Places I Wasn’t Looking in the Long Dream (2024), which resembles a bouquet of flowers and feathers, she deliberately considers the open space of the painting.

An avid reader and writer, Su titles each of her paintings with purpose, using enigmatic, poetic phrases to provide just a hint of direction. This practice encourages viewers to derive their own interpretations and meanings from the abstract forms. Indeed, in many cases, viewers end up seeing images not intended by the artist. Su envisions each title like a passcode to help viewers approach the painting. “It’s a small text—a code to crack the code inside the painting. It gives you a background story, and then you’re trying to see what’s inside the painting,” she said. Some viewers, she said, told her they found butterflies in One Hundred and Twenty Seconds.

In her Brixton studio, two paintings in progress hang behind her, both currently untitled. The works, she explained, are originally based on photographs of a person in her apartment taken last year but have gradually been refigured into something unfamiliar. As she paints, she stops intermittently to read poetry, currently poems by Federico García Lorca, which she said is “in love with.” Other times, she stops to write short poetic phrases in Chinese. This balance of visual and verbal art, she said, keeps her energized and inspires the titles for her evocative paintings.

Su did not always draw from her own memories. Instead, she said, “I was always depicting other people’s lives,” a kind of “borrowed experience.” However, halfway through her time at the Royal College of Art, that changed. This evolution in her practice was starkly evident in her recent show at Half Gallery. After more than 500 days abroad for her MFA, Su traveled home to Beijing. There, she returned to the spaces of her childhood, which felt somewhat unfamiliar. “You feel like you have all of those experiences that have literally happened to you, but then when you’re standing on your homeland, you feel none of those memories ever existed,” explained Su. To reckon with this dissociative experience, she endeavored to provoke a similar sense of defamiliarization in her paintings, where familiar subjects are no longer recognizable.