Su Xiaobai’s Lacquer Paintings Awaken a 15th-Century Palazzo in Venice
“Alchemical Universe” marks the first time the 77-year-old Chinese artist has mounted a collateral exhibition at the Biennale
Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel has been asleep for a long time. The 15th-century Gothic palazzo in Venice’s Cannaregio neighborhood holds its history—thick walls, stone floors, and delicate frescoes painted in the rooms. Su Xiaobai walked through it and felt the dormancy. “Before I came,” he said through a translator, “the buildings, all these historical spirits, they were sleeping. Now, with my work, they are awakened. Now they are talking to each other.”
Xiaobai’s exhibition, “Alchemical Universe,” woke them up.
Presented by the Su Xiaobai Foundation in collaboration with LACMA and on view through November 22, the exhibition brings together 35 paintings that trace the Chinese artist’s three-decade relationship with natural lacquer—from a 2003 work the color of dark chocolate, its burlap ground visible beneath the surface, to new paintings made specifically for Venice. It is the first time the 77-year-old artist has mounted a collateral exhibition at the Biennale, despite countless visits to the city. What finally convinced him was the theme: “In Minor Keys,” developed by the late curator Koyo Kouoh, who died in March before she could see the 61st La Biennale di Venezia come to life. Kouoh developed the theme as a response to the violence, greed, consumption, and overstimulation that currently plague the world, and the hope that more quietness and slowness could be the solution. Xiaobai took it personally. “It’s not only art that needs minor keys,” he said. “The world needs to slow down. It’s too much—too much consumption and too many differences.”
Xiaobai’s path to lacquer came later in life. For years, he painted in the Social Realist figurative tradition, until professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf told him, “You are from China, where ink and paper are used—you should not paint like us,” he recounted to curator Stephen Little in the exhibition catalog. The remark was meant to exclude him. Instead, it led Xiaobai to his own reckoning. When Xiaobai traveled to Fujian province in the early 2000s at the invitation of Rhineland-Palatinate’s Minister of Culture, to facilitate a scholarly exchange, he found something he hadn’t expected. Fujian had been a center of lacquer production since the Song Dynasty. He befriended lacquer artists and became fascinated with the material, and he experimented with its possibilities. When he returned to Germany with 108 lacquer works, his professors were impressed, assuring him that this was his path.
The process is slow by necessity. Xiaobai works on multiple paintings simultaneously between his studios in Düsseldorf and Shanghai, building up as many as 20 layers, each one dried before the next is applied. There is no shortcut. “He would like it to be finished right after the first layer,” said his translator, almost apologetically. “But never. So he puts layer and layer again, until he gets the layer he wanted.” The results demonstrate the patience: specks of orange surfacing through green, mustard lacquer cracked into dark grids, and grey swirls settling into a marble-like finish.
For Venice, Xiaobai also brought Fujian’s ruins into the work. Roof tiles salvaged from Fujian homes torn down to build skyscrapers—he collected more than 10,000 pieces—are covered in black or red lacquer, drilled with fine holes at each corner, and hung individually to form a suspended installation, like they’re floating on air. “You can put even something you like above a tile, and it will move and won’t fall down,” said Xiaobai as he put his wallet on a tile to demonstrate.
The work is imbued with nods to the water that runs through and surrounds Venice; the exhibition opens with a section of large Murano glass tiles embossed with ripples, imitating the soft movement in the canals, laid on top of the palazzo’s terrazzo floor. Two of Xiaobai’s paintings sit on them as if they were floating works of art moving through the water. Two more works flank the installation. Blue is layered over white, evoking the glittering water as the sky reflects on its surface.
Kulapat Yantrasast, the architect and designer behind WHY Architecture, designed the installation, adding draped white fabric as a backdrop, or an antique mirror to complement the paintings; LACMA’s Stephen Little, the museum’s curator of Chinese art, selected the works. But the decisions that matter most are Xiaobai’s own, and they are almost all about restraint. He did not want to overpower the palazzo. “My works are not here to occupy the building,” he said. In a room he believes was once a daughter’s bedroom, a light orange diptych sits on a low white platform. He pointed to it and asked: “In the morning, when you get up and it’s not raining, and you open your eyes and look at the sky—what color is it?”
The question didn’t need an answer. In “Alchemical Universe,” Xiaobai achieves exactly what Kouoh intended with “In Minor Keys”: a moment of contemplation, an opportunity to slow down, and a quiet place to think and observe in the middle of a chaotic period.