O-1 Visas
How to capture what is fleeting with its transience intact? That might sound like a koan or maybe just an oxymoron but actually it could be the question guiding the paintings produced by Winnie Weiyun Szu over the past few years. Szu applies distemper, encaustic, oil, tempera, or sumi ink to paper, panels, or canvas, stretched and unstretched, small medium and extra-large, and mostly the resulting picture gives the impression of a landscape. Nothing unusual there, and yet to look at her finished compositions is not to see a place but instead to notice the shift in the clouds, catch the streak of sunlight through a window, detect the cold blue of snow, wonder how the dune will drift, sense an air current on skin, be blinded by a spark. Caused by weather, perception, geology or some combination thereof, Szu represents such temporary phenomena with an impossibly luminous and mobile touch, using streaky paint and visible marks, irregular yet magical color combinations, and shapes that tend to disagree, as if channeling the essence of the occurrences themselves.
—Lori Waxman 8/3/26 1:12 PM