KATHERINE QIYU SU

NIGHT LANDING

February 12th, 6-8 PM

February 12th - March 15th, 2025

In aviation nomenclature, “night landing” is the arrival of a flight an hour after sunset or an hour before sunrise. Katherine Qiyu Su considers this interval her most fertile period for conjuring the allegorical in paintings. Katherine likes to think of the flight recorder housed on airplanes - the black box recording its movements and status - as a metaphor for her own creativity. “At times, I find myself believing in the struggle shared by all humans,” continues Su, “the tension between collective unease and inevitable disappointment. And in that, I see the possibility of resonance.”

In her painting “Green Velvet Hill Overlooking the Port,” the artist hints at the suggestion of a half-lidded eyeball near the center of her composition. Or maybe it’s a bubble in which case she winks at us as though to reference “homo bulla,” the Latin term for man as a bubble. Dutch 17th century painters depicted soap bubbles in their work as a cousin to memento mori. Here Su opts for a more nebulous interpretation. “Imagination always grants us a potential momentum,” she explains of her practice. “It is both the force of hypothesis and the hope within a hypothetical proposition. These images hold anxiety, scattered thoughts, and the instinct to escape-yet through this medium, they can be veiled, deconstructed, and reassembled into something idealized, something liberating, a defense against anxiety.”