Interweaving: Xiang Su

In Interweaving, West Vancouver-based artist Xiang Su shows intricately woven geometric works on canvas and a large-scale installation, stretching the height of the gallery, made of hundreds of pieces of thread. This deeply personal collection of work draws from Su’s experience as a Chinese Canadian artist, and layers themes of childhood, memory, and home with issues surrounding immigration, otherness, and assimilation.

As a young girl, Su remembers watching her mother and grandmother spinning thread and weaving fabric at home on their loom. Slowly, as the women worked, fabric in plaid patterns would materialize. This fabric was used to create clothes for family members and these happy childhood memories were formative for Su. Like many families at that time, her family moved from their home in the countryside to a larger city. Su’s mother began working in a textile factory using an industrial loom and the fabric she made was sold all over the world. Su left China to attend university in Canada where she missed her childhood home and tried to form a transnational identity. She says “as a new immigrant in Canada, I experienced both peace and conflict. After struggling between these two cultures for years, I realized that it was impossible and unreasonable for me to have a single cultural identity”. She began to ask herself what it would be like to live ‘in-between’ cultures and countries and this inquiry manifested itself in her work.

This interstitial space Su is interested in is represented in her installation. Hundreds of strings stretch from the floor to the ceiling, where they peak and then descend across the gallery, requiring visitors to pass through the installation and the spaces it creates. Set against the back wall of the gallery, the installation references a large industrial loom, the kind her mother worked on, and from the ceiling hangs plaid bolts of fabric woven by Su’s mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. Four generations of women are represented in this installation which stretches across space, and symbolically, through time.

Her two-dimensional pieces on canvas also nod to the work of her mother and grandmother, while adding Su’s perspective. Using nails to create anchor points along the perimeter of the canvas, thread in various colours is intricately woven to create plaid-like patterns. In Interveaving, Su’s most recent pieces on canvas no longer use a grid patterns, and instead their forms are organic and fluid. Su says that both she and her work have transformed over time to embody both past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. Her childhood memories, like threads on her mother’s loom, have coalesced with her experiences as an adult, and continue to create something new and self-defined, inch by inch, layer by layer.

Xiang Su is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates culture and identity through installation, photography, video, painting, and drawing. She earned her B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2010 and has exhibited in both Canada and China.

Reception: Sunday, August 9, 2 – 4 p.m. (visitors will be limited to 6 at a time)
Online Artist Talk: Sunday, August 30, 2 p.m.