BIOGRAPHY
Xuan Sue (b. 2003) is an artist based in Milan. She received her BFA in Visual Arts and Painting from NABA, Milan. Working across painting, performance, and installation, she employs materials ranging from mineral pigments to spray paint. Her practice investigates perceptual and embodied intensity, drawing from phenomenology, Material Culture Studies, and feminist anthropology. Through saturated color and physical gesture, her work explores how meaning emerges through friction rather than resolution.
I am drawn to moments of intensity—when color nears vibration or when a subtle gesture shifts a room's atmosphere. These charged moments contain an unexpected stillness.
Following John Dewey's idea of "repose in stimulation," my work explores the tension between risk and presence, arousal and focus. Instead of seeking balance, it keeps this tension open and active.
Between paint and the body, between color and risk, the practice inhabits this charged, enduring tension.
between paintings
My paintings begin in geometry and end in recognition.
Starting from points, lines, and planes, I rotate the canvas and let the process unfold: animals emerge from within abstract structure, not placed but discovered. I think of this as a methodology rather than a subject — a sustainable way of making, the way Mondrian's trees held on to themselves even as they became pure line.The animals that surface in my work are not mine. They are built from what we already share: the long ears of a rabbit, the round ears of a bear, the triangular face of a cat or fox — a collective, softened memory, closer to a stuffed toy than to a living creature.
The eyes in my paintings are always two dark circles, because that threshold of recognition — the moment a face appears in a cluster of marks — is what I am after. John Berger wrote about how children encounter animals before language, through toy, image, and pattern. I work in that same pre-critical space of intimacy and tenderness.
Color arrives through intuition. I prepare roughly the same warm palette before each painting; the choices that follow are felt, like the decision to draw a line long or short, heavy or light. A pastel ground on linen gives me an imprecise, gestural start — a surface already alive with possibility. What begins as something real — a room, a table, a group of small creatures gathered together — opens gradually into psychological space. The viewer arrives at something familiar but not fixed, tender but not sentimental: a world they already half-know.
我的画从几何开始，在辨认中结束。
从点、线、面出发，我旋转画布，让过程展开：动物从抽象结构内部浮现，不是被安置在那里，而是被发现的。我将这视为一种方法论而非主题——一种可以持续延展的创作方式，就像蒙德里安的树在变成纯粹线条的过程中始终保有自身。在我作品中浮现的动物不属于我，它们由我们共同拥有的记忆构成：兔子的长耳朵，小熊的圆耳朵，猫或狐狸的三角形脸——一种集体的、柔化的记忆，比起真实生物，更接近于毛绒玩具。
我画中的眼睛总是两个深色的圆，因为那个辨认的门槛——在一组笔触中忽然看见一张脸的瞬间——正是我在追求的。约翰·伯格写过，孩童在语言之前便已通过玩具、图像与图案与动物相遇。我工作在同一个前批判性的亲密与童真的空间里。
色彩来自直觉。每次作画前我准备大致相同的暖色调色盘；随后的选择是被感知到的，就像决定一根线的长短、轻重。亚麻布上的粉彩底给了我一个不精确的、姿态性的开始——一个已经充满可能性的表面。从某个真实的事物开始——一个房间、一张桌子、一群聚集在一起的小小形体——慢慢打开成为心理空间。观者到达的是某种熟悉却未被固定的东西，温柔而不感伤：一个他们已经半知晓的世界。