Susan Chen
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
“You can just put these feelings on the back shelf and ignore them, which would be easier. Or, you can make a painting about it which really forces you to think about the situation emotionally—about why you feel the way you feel.”
– Susan Chen
On Longing
Installation View
Susan Chen and I connected a few weeks before her first solo exhibition was to open at Meredith Rosen Gallery. I had not known her work before then, though I was captivated by the images she shared… by the intimate faces that stare back at me, the warm colors, and the feeling that I really was getting a glimpse into the souls of the people she painted. Since her initial email, On Longing has opened, sold out; and this year, her work covered with rave reviews by The New York Times, ArtForum, Artnet and Hyperallergic to name a few. In part of our interview, Susan stated that ‘it’s strange going from being a nobody to having a waiting list in the space of a week and realizing—learning how to shut that pressure out when you’re in the studio.’ To be clear, there was nothing about Susan or her work that gave the feel of being ‘a nobody’ when she reached out. Instead, it looks like the world just needed a bit of time to catch up with her talent. Her success is so well deserved and I could not be more excited to follow her career going forward.
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
About Face
Susan Chen
Elizabeth Cheatham McNairy: I thought we’d start by just having you tell me a little bit about yourself and your art.
Susan Chen: I’ll just talk about myself?
EMC: Yeah, I don’t know that much about you though I know I love your work! I would love to learn a little bit of your background and we then we will take it from there.
SC: Sure… I grew up in Hong Kong until I was 12, and then I was sort of abruptly sent to boarding school abroad in the United Kingdom. Hong Kong was a British colony until ’97 so there were a lot of ties especially with education and school. I grew up sort of commuting between this very small apartment in Hong Kong and going to school in the United Kingdom on scholarship before coming to the States and immigrating to America happened—not by accident, but with a lot of luck and years of paperwork. So I feel very lucky to be here. I don’t think it’s possible to chase this sort of painter’s dream—now Hong Kong is very different from what it was. Also people forget that China didn’t become wealthy until 2008. But I grew up in the time of the one-child policy, so I think it makes me a feminist at heart. My parents were illegal immigrants who arrived in Hong Kong in the late 1980s, and so it’s been really strange—it’s fascinating for them. The art world is so different—I don’t think my dad has, for example, been to an art exhibition. He hasn’t gone to one of mine yet. It’s a very different world.
EMC: Is your family still in Hong Kong?
SC: Yes. So all of my family members are still in Hong Kong or Shanghai or Taiwan except for my sister and I. A part of being able to be here, I think, also has to do with having an Ivy League education. They say it’s by lottery, but I think it helps when you sit in front of lawyers and they’re like, ‘Okay, how are you contributing to society.’ So that’s also interesting.
EMC: When you came to the states to study, did you initially focus—have you always focused on art? When you went to Brown, did you realize you wanted a career in the arts? Was pursuing your art a hard choice for you to make or for your family to accept, or do you feel like this artistic path has been something that’s always been supported?
SC: I’ve always been artistic in middle school and high school, but I never thought it’d become my job. In college, my parents did not want me to major in art. They were like, ‘We didn’t send you all the way to this fancy school so that you could have an art degree.’
EMC: ’So you could just draw all day.’
SC: Yeah. I think it also has to do with culture, Asian culture. It’s a generation thing; a whole generation of parents wanting their kids to just be doctors, lawyers, and engineers is actually very real. I don’t know if it’s just an Asian thing or if it’s parents in general, but I think it’s particularly emphasized in Asian culture. So I didn’t learn how to really paint until junior year of college. I ended up double majoring because I did all my art credits in the winter and summer breaks, because my parents were like, ‘We don’t want you to do this.’
Actually, what happened was I saw this David Hockney exhibition, and it completely changed my life. This was during sophomore summer, and I was like, ‘Oh no, I have to learn how to paint! I have to do it!’ It was a very life-changing situation, and I always think about how one show can have an impact on someone or how any artist’s show can change someone without them realizing.
EMC: Absolutely. So true. So where did you see the show—do you remember?
SC: It was at the Bilbao Guggenheim. I was doing a study abroad that summer for a couple weeks. I happened to be there at the time… I had a family member who stopped talking to me for a year when I told them I was going to art school. My grandparents thought an MFA stood for a Masters in Financial Accounting.
EMC: They were like, ‘That’s great!’
SC: I think my parents were not for it—but I think the longer you stick to it, they know you’re committed. I think they’re coming around. It’s been really funny, because for example, this weekend I told them that John Yau and Jerry Saltz wrote about me, and they were like, ‘Who are they?’
EMC: You were like, ‘It’s a really big deal!
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
Tadashi Mitsui
Susan Chen
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
Tenzin & Her Cactus Garden
Susan Chen
SC: So it’s funny when situations like that happen, but I’m glad they’re open to me being on this road.
EMC: Absolutely. I think it can be really scary for the people who love us when we step off their expected path for us. But, when they can see how dedicated we are to something and how it fills our souls, they hopefully learn to respect the path we have chosen for ourselves… even if it is far from how they thought things would look. Congratulations for that write-up, by the way! That is a big deal.
SC: Thank you so much.
EMC: As we talk about the power of an exhibition—you just opened your first solo exhibition! I would just love to hear about what you learned about yourself and your craft through the process of creating the exhibit On Longing at Meredith Rosen Gallery.
SC: I think there are definitely a lot of lessons that were very surprising to me that I didn’t think I would consider or feel strongly about… We were kicked out of our MFA studios in March, so our studio pandemic experience felt more dramatic than it had to be. I ended up shifting my practice because painting strangers and sitters would not be so safe during a pandemic. So, I had to paint myself, and I think we did some extreme things for me to be able to have a studio at home. I moved all my furniture from the living room to carve out a makeshift studio. When I was visiting my sister, we tossed out a queen-sized bed for me to make a studio—what feels a little dramatic and extreme in order to be able to continue working during a lockdown period. But now the great thing is I know how to work in less-than-a-hundred-square-foot spaces. There were two hardcore weeks of me just researching lights or how to put the right lights in a home condition. Light is usually warmer in a home, but it significantly affects the color of your palette. I was like, ‘Whoa! These little things actually make a huge difference in being able to see what you’re making at home!’
When we were installing the show - I had a lot of help installing the show - and I kept waiting for other artists to appear. I’m so used to putting on my own group shows and installing everything myself, so this weird experience of, ‘Oh, I don’t have to do the work right now because people around me are doing it for me.’ I was not used to that, so that was funny. But I think what is interesting to me is wanting to fight this sort of art system, just so it’s a little more accessible, but then realizing that I’m now a full-fledged part of it. An example would be how a lot of people wanted to acquire my paintings, but what ended up happening was that the paintings would essentially go to billionaires or millionaires first on this waiting list. I don’t know how honest I can be, but these were just surprising things. It’s interesting that I’m making these paintings that are very personal, and then the people who want them might not necessarily get them and it ends up with someone who might not necessarily have wanted them from the beginning but might just get them because of their social status or status in the art world?
EMC: The exposure or looking at it more as an investment? Is that what you’re saying?
SC: Yeah, totally! Obviously, I’m grateful because people want to collect my work. I can’t complain about that. But for a billionaire, the painting might feel like a couple cents to them and it might probably end up in storage. I did make this mistake one time of selling a painting to someone instead of the sitters themselves, and that was really kind of an emotional lesson for me to learn from. Now I give all my sitters the first right of refusal, because I realize it’s meaningful to them. Lessons like that. It’s also strange going from being a nobody to having a waiting list in the space of a week and realizing—learning how to shut that pressure out when you’re in the studio. That’s a very strange feeling.
EMC: It’s interesting, I did an interview a little while ago with a woman who goes by Unskilled Worker on Instagram. She had actually said this in a different interview and I asked her to expand upon it, but she said something like, ‘Success can be so loud and there really is this need to shut it out.’ Basically, this need to find stillness and silence so that success isn’t affecting at all what you create, to leave that outside the studio and come in and show up for your art.
SC: Absolutely. I think Agnes Martin was very big on silence in the studio and Louise Bourgeois would be very pissed even if there was a little bit of traffic sound or something.
EMC: Absolutely. I think the silencing, too, of the mind, of ‘What will people think? How will it compare to the last exhibit?’ Kind of not letting yourself go there and acknowledging when those voices show up and trying to silence that a little bit.
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
Arnie’s
Susan Chen
SC: Yeah. That’s where I wonder—you know how tennis players have huge crowds all the time, and now that there’s a pandemic, people still have to continue playing these matches. I wonder if now without the crowds, if they’re able to do better.
EMC: Sure! Yeah. That’s a great question. Hmm, yeah, that’s interesting… Okay, a couple questions. You have mentioned that things really shifted within your work when COVID started in regards to being used to painting other people and no longer being able to have sitters. What percentage was created before and after we went into quarantine? And besides the fact that maybe more of the paintings got focused on you and not having as many people to model, were there any other main differences you saw within the feel or technique or the theme once you shifted into quarantine?
SC: Yeah. Half the show was made right before the quarantine and half the show after. The gallery just so happened to have two rooms in one space, so it was kind of cool to be able to exhibit these two bodies of work next to each other. A lot of the sitter portraits happened from September. My last big group portrait of Yang Gang I made in January and February right when COVID started happening. With sitters, I paint them one-on-one, so it’s still a really intimate experience. I feel like one of the biggest things I noticed from working at home during lockdown is that you have a lot more time. It was like suddenly all of these rules were tossed out the window and you could hit a reset button and be like, ‘Ok, that’s what the school wants, that’s what the market wants—’ But now you’re in a bubble, and I thought that bubble was really nice because it allows you to take time, and I think that definitely affected the work. I wouldn’t say the quality, but it just allowed me to read more about other painters, about their techniques and then being able to bring that into my own work. Also, color I noticed was different. In a studio, you have—I wouldn’t say sterile lights; they’re quite bright, the fluorescent tubes… whereas if you look at a lot of Alice Neel’s work, you can feel that she was working from an apartment, a homey space. I noticed that because I didn’t have that kind of sterile lighting in my apartment and my walls weren’t white—so you’re painting in a home setting, for a home setting. I like to assume paintings will eventually end up in a home. There’s something nice about that.
EMC: Did you find yourself wondering if you would want to change your lights once you got back into the studio?
SC: I thought it might be helpful to make it more homey, maybe have some carpets or some plants. The things around you really do affect your work—what you see everyday, even if they’re small, mundane things. I’m a big believer that your living environment really affects your painting subconsciously (thinking about Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space). Like if your childhood bedroom was blue your whole life, I’m sure that would feed into the work. That kind of thing.
EMC: I totally agree; environment really is so important. I have a couple things that I want to pull out of your artist statement to ask you to expand upon. One thing that I really thought was so fascinating was this sentence that “these individuals are not professional models so they fill the silence of five-hour studio sittings with conversations, turning the painting sessions into therapy sessions.” Can you talk about how having that entry into their life and into their souls and into their thinking—how that affects how you paint them versus if that conversation did not exist, if they were just sitting for the portrait and not interacting with you more?
SC: That’s a really good question. I think when I first started out, I was having a really challenging time because the first time I would ever meet the sitter would be when they arrived at the studio. I wouldn’t know about them until basically after I painted them. What I wanted to do was bring their story into the work, and the scary thing about that is that you don’t know what kind of story they’ll tell you. There’s this one painting, for example—this girl came in, I painted her. She told me this really beautiful story about how she grew up playing with her brother in this cactus garden when they were in Tibet before they immigrated to America when she was 9 years old. I thought that story of the cactus garden was really sweet. It was a very fond memory for her, so I tried to put that into the painting afterwards. But if she didn’t tell me that story, maybe I wouldn’t have painted in a cactus garden. Now I’m trying to shift that, so I give myself less anxiety in the painting process. I talk to the sitter beforehand, either on the phone or something, just so that when they get to the studio, I’m not just improvising on the spot. I guess that’s what happened with the Yang Gang painting. I found myself with less anxiety because I had control over the setting or context of the painting. I was going to these canvassing and signature gathering events, so then I had control over where these sitters were situated versus only finding out midway through a painting.
EMC: Yes. Something that you then felt you needed to include.
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
Lyly Louanghaksaphone
Susan Chen
“What I wanted to do was bring their story into the work, and the scary thing about that is that you don’t know what kind of story they’ll tell you.”
– Susan Chen
SC: Yeah. There was another part of that question, though, that I thought was really thoughtful, but it just slipped my mind… Oh, I remember now! Sitters have been really surprising, by the things that they choose to do in the studio. One person was trying to teach himself Nepalese, so they were taking the time to read this book and teach themselves this language during the five-hour sitting. So it automatically caused me to question why they’re reading that book. Then you find out it’s because they’re going to be visiting Nepal for the first time soon, and they want to be able to communicate with their family. So you’re like, ‘Oh! That’s cool.’
I had another sitter who was job hunting for six months and was a fresh grad, and he brought his CV—he was like, ‘You go to an Ivy League school; will you fix my CV for me?’ These things that are a total surprise that you just don’t anticipate—and I was like, ‘Sure!’ So I end up spending like five hours the next couple days fixing his CV. I guess because I find my sitters on social media, and I do pay them as sitters, so you just never know. It’s a great mixed bag of surprises.
EMC: Yes. Absolutely…that is too funny about the CV… I'm sure your help meant a lot to him. There were a couple other things that I just loved from your artist statement. One was that “you paint to answer questions about your own identity and to address the lack of Asian Americans in Western portraiture. Your paintings are at once powerful and vulnerable.” The other part is, “She must confront her own fears and desires in each portrait.” I think there’s a lot to unpack in those. What I’d love to start with is this sentence of ‘You are at once powerful and vulnerable.’ What does power and vulnerability mean to you? Then, can you share with us some of your own fears and desires as it relates to your painting or your life in general, and how they then impact your art?
SC: Those are really good questions. I think the vulnerability comes from—I was reading this book about the psychology of Asian Americans. It’s titled Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation. The problem I have with this book is that because this feels so new—for example, at Yale they just made the Race and Ethnicity Center a department in 2019. At Columbia, it’s still a center; it’s not a department yet, which means they can’t hire their own faculty. These are leading schools, so for the rest of the country with universities, it’s like, ‘If the leading schools don’t even have a race department…how do we expect other universities to follow suit?’ We can see in Trump’s America how big these racial issues are when impacting society. Yet, we still don’t have the proper departments to study it, but there’s a clear and growing demand for this education. Anyway, the problem I had with this book is that there’s not that many of them, so it sort of flattens the experience, the Asian American experience; it compresses it into one. I think what I’m trying to say is all of this feels very new. I was reading this book, and it was the first time where I saw terms for what I was feeling: psychological terms for feelings that a whole population is experiencing—but no one talks about, so no one knows that it’s a thing. (Kind of like how “cultural appropriation” is a recent term). In that sense, it was really vulnerable. Because a lot of the times you don’t want to talk about these experiences that are really uncomfortable. For example, my boyfriend who I’ve been dating for five years is a Caucasian American, and for a year, my grandparents just wouldn’t acknowledge that. You can just put these feelings on the back shelf and ignore them, which would be easier. Or, you can make a painting about it which really forces you to think about the situation emotionally—about why you feel the way you feel. That’s just one instance, but there’s other things too, like immigration. Some days I wake up and I’m just crying for no reason because I had a dream about my dad. I don’t get to see him a lot because he’s in Asia, just once a year. That has to do with part of the process of immigration. For a lot of immigrants, for example, if you were to leave the country now—your visas would be impacted, also because of the pandemic, so people can’t go home or where they’re originally from. I guess vulnerability has to do with painting about these experiences: it forces you to confront them versus putting them on the back shelf, which I think a lot of people can do. I don’t know about power—I’ve never had a female Asian painter come to the studio the whole two years I was at Columbia, so who do I look up to? It’s kind of scary to be like, ‘I actually don’t know who to look—’ I think of Yayoi Kasuma? I know there are other artists out there. It’s just we don’t usually get taught about them.
EMC: Well, Susan, I have an incredible artist, Lien Truong, who I would love to introduce you to. She is a professor at UNC and an incredible painter. So if I may introduce you at some point, I would just love that.
SC: I would love that! That would be really, really nice!
EMC: I am actually working on an interview with her now, so you’ll get to read about her as well! I will introduce y’all.
SC: That’s awesome! Thank you so much! But I feel lucky. I was able to work in Shara Hughes’ studio briefly before grad school, and seeing is believing. There are other female artists who make this all seem more possible.
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
Claudia Ng & Chris Shum
Susan Chen
EMC: Shara’s the best. I loved it when she posted about your show. You and I had just connected and I reached out to her to say we would be doing an interview. It’s really amazing how small the art world can be sometimes. What an amazing artist to get to work with! I think Shara is someone who has really found a way to stay very balanced as her career has really taken off.
SC: Totally. I was in her studio before the Whitney Biennial and it was really interesting for me to see what the studio was like before the Biennial and after the Biennial, and that sort of pressure. I can understand why some people stop making art after the Biennial, because if you can’t take on that pressure, it can really crush you. She’s been able to survive and I was like, ‘You’re really badass!’
EMC: You’re right. She’s totally badass… Okay, we got to the power and vulnerability, and if you’re open to it, I’d love to discuss now the sentence of “As an Asian American, she must confront her own fears and desires in every portrait. On Longing represents her embrace of this dichotomy.” Will you expand on that?
SC: Let me try. I think something about desires is it’s kind of what you really, really want, what your soul really wants. Most people—I don’t know, it’s kind of embarrassing putting that out there. Even with this portrait, where I put twelve of my favorite artists that I was really heavily influenced by in the past two years. To other people, maybe they’re just famous painters, but for me, they’re my friends in the studio. When I’m in the studio, I’m like, ‘I’m not alone in this. I have other people with me.’ And I secretly dream of being like them one day too. It’s kind of embarrassing, a lot of work is really embarrassing, but I’m like, ‘I’m just gonna put it out there!’ Like with the naked portrait, I was like, ‘I don’t want my family to see this, but I’m just gonna put it out there!’
EMC: Absolutely! There is this real connection between vulnerability and ‘this is very uncomfortable and scary, but it’s what I’m supposed to do,’ you know what I mean? It’s not a super easy path to always stay in your creativity or your authenticity, especially if there’s been pressure in the past to follow a more traditional path.
SC: The other thing is I also had been avoiding painting myself for over a year. I just didn’t want to look in the mirror at myself for long hours. This week I was like, ‘I’m getting back into the studio. I’m just going to do a couple landscapes.’ Because you don’t want to stare at yourself. But when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror for ten hours, and then also when there’s five paintings of yourself together next to you, it’s just a little too much self-reflection. It gets too psychological—it’s like, ‘I’m going to have to see a therapist after this!’
EMC: ‘I’m really tired of myself right now!’ That is so funny. Do you feel like in a way after you stare at yourself for a long enough time, do you get more space—do you begin to get some detachment from it where your reflection almost becomes a sitter, or does it always feel much more tied as you paint? Does that make sense?
SC: Actually, would you mind repeating that again?
EMC: Sure. When you’re painting someone else—or I would assume that when you paint somebody else, there’s this level of detachment. Not that you’re not connected, but there isn’t as much of a picking apart of something. Whereas looking at your own reflection, you might have a tendency to have opinions on what you see. I’m not always super nice when I’m looking in the mirror, to be honest, where if I look at another person, I don’t pick them apart like I would myself. It has a very different energy to it, and I wonder how that relates to doing a self-portrait. Did you ever get to a point where you had more distance and became a little more detached like you would if you were painting somebody else, or did any of that come up for you?
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
Covid-19 Survival Kit
Susan Chen
Image Courtesy of Susan Chen
Jimmy P & Me: How to Co-Exist
Susan Chen
SC: That’s a really smart question! I’ve never thought about that, but it makes a lot of sense. I think when you’re painting someone else —for me, the questions that come into my head are, ‘How does this person end up in my studio, of all people? Why did the universe send me this person? Who is this person?’ It’s more of a curiosity. Whereas if you’re painting yourself, especially as a female, you can become really self-critical. Even about looking at the body, being like, ‘Oh, I have cellulite now.’ ‘I’m 28; what does that mean?’ Or, ‘I have all these new sun spots.’ There definitely is this self-criticism that you don’t have with a sitter. I don’t know if it’s person to person, but I do feel like as a female it might be harsher.
EMC: Sure. Probably so because there’s so much focus put on our looks.
SC: Beauty standards.
EMC: For sure. I was thrilled to hear your exhibit will be extended a bit. I so wish I could make it up to see it in person. I’d love to finish our interview by you telling us what is filling your time and your soul right now?
SC: I’m taking a short summer vacation and am at the Cape till the end of the month. I’m taking these few weeks to study nature, and have joined the Eastham Painters Guild as a guest artist—every Tuesday morning the painters gather for an en plein air painting session at a different location each week. I want to study light and mood. Also to have some quiet time to just make work again. I’m also currently in the midst of reading, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, Phillip Gustons’ Late Work: A Memoir by William Corbett, and Uncontrollable Beauty by Bill Beckley and David Shapiro.
EMC: How wonderful! I so hope you will send me some in-process photos while you are at the Cape… I’d love to share them with our readers in our stories.