20 Mar Unearthing the Sky: Materiality and Transformation in OCMA’s Dual Exhibitions
By Tyler Stallings
At the Orange County Museum of Art, two exhibitions—Su Yu-Xin: Searching the Sky for Gold and Unearthed—create a compelling juxtaposition, a dialogue of materiality, process, and elemental transformation. Both curated by Ziying Duan, OCMA’s assistant curator, the exhibitions open simultaneously, offering an exploration of the earth’s materials, albeit through vastly different yet intertwined approaches. Unearthed grounds us in the ancient and tactile traditions of ceramics, while Searching the Sky for Gold pushes painting toward an ephemeral, alchemical practice. The titles alone suggest an inherent duality—earth and sky, excavation and transcendence—mirroring how artists have long sought to capture the raw forces that shape our world.
The Poetics of Pigment in Searching the Sky for Gold
Su Yu-Xin’s first solo museum exhibition outside of Asia is an expansive meditation on the nature of pigments—their origins, migrations, and their transformation into the landscapes we see. Her paintings are not merely representations of place but material records of place itself. By sourcing pigments from minerals, volcanic ash, and oceanic detritus, Su collapses the distinction between material and subject matter. The Birth of an Island (Niijima, South of Iwo Jima), 2024, for instance, is composed of black volcanic rock, malachite, ochre, and iron dioxide green, substances that themselves hold the memory of geological shifts. Each painting reads like a stratigraphic map, where layers of history are embedded in the surfaces
The installation further amplifies this material sensitivity. Su designed the exhibition benches to sit low, inviting viewers to crouch near paintings that rest on organically shaped wooden supports. These benches, resembling halved tree trunks or driftwood lodged in a forest clearing, subtly reinforce the connection between human body and landscape. Seated at this lower vantage point, one becomes acutely aware of the weight of minerals crushed into the paintings, the glint of ground pyrite, or the porous breathability of ochre.
Several works take on the qualities of ephemeral, shifting matter. Dust Crown (Mount St. Helens), 2024, incorporates Helenite, a gemstone formed by the intense heat of volcanic eruptions, while A Detonation, and the Time It Spent with the World (Atomic Bomb Test, New Mexico), 2024, employs realgar and cinnabar—minerals historically associated with both beauty and toxicity. These works speak to the way Su’s practice does not simply collect and apply pigment but interrogates its deeper historical and environmental contexts. The air, seemingly insubstantial, is rendered as a carrier of pollutants, smoke, volcanic ash, and radiation—forces that drift across borders and time periods.
Unearthed: The Intimacy of Geological Time
If Su’s paintings emphasize transience and fluidity, Unearthed turns toward weight and permanence. The exhibition brings together six contemporary artists working with ceramics—Alex Anderson, Shuyi Cao, Tony Marsh, Keita Matsunaga, Yuji Ueda, and Masaomi Yasunaga—each engaging with the fundamental process of shaping earth through fire. The act of firing ceramic, Duan suggests in her curatorial framing, mirrors the geological processes that formed the earth’s crust over millennia.
Among the most striking works is Swamp (17 years underground), 2021, by Shuyi Cao, a ceramic vessel embedded with cicada shells, mineral glazes, and rocks. It is as if the artwork itself has been unearthed from an archeological dig—its surface a fusion of biological remnants and earthen matter. Cao’s works function as time capsules, embedding histories of decay, transformation, and preservation. The insect casings trapped in the ceramic’s glaze seem to whisper of a world beyond human time scales, where nature’s slow processes continue undeterred.
Masaomi Yasunaga takes a different approach, submerging his ceramic pieces in layers of sand, ash, and rock before firing. The results, such as the Melting Vessel series, 2022-2024, emerge looking like relics from a lost civilization, as if centuries of geological forces shaped them rather than human hands. The tension between what is made and what is found is a key thread throughout Unearthed. In contrast, Yuji Ueda’s works embrace the chaos of the kiln, allowing cracks, fissures, and mineral reactions to form unpredictably across his sculptural surfaces. The outcome is both controlled and wild—a nod to the forces of heat and pressure that define ceramic history.
A Shared Sensibility
While the two exhibitions explore different mediums, they are united by a shared sensibility: an attentiveness to the way raw materials shape the final form of an artwork. Both Su’s work and the ceramics in Unearthed hinge on the unpredictable transformations that occur when natural substances undergo external forces—whether volcanic eruptions, chemical reactions, or extreme heat.
The brilliance of Duan’s curatorial pairing is how it draws attention to these relationships without forcing them into a singular narrative. Searching the Sky for Gold and Unearthed invite us to see the deep time embedded in materials, to recognize that every pigment, every glaze, carries a history far older than human memory. Through acts of making—grinding pigments, firing clay, layering minerals—these artists remind us that we are not separate from the earth but deeply enmeshed within it.
Both exhibitions resist the static, instead revealing processes still unfolding—colors changing in response to light, minerals undergoing slow transformations, and ceramic surfaces recalling the tectonic movements that shaped them. In doing so, Searching the Sky for Gold and Unearthed extend beyond the museum space, gesturing toward the vast and continuous forces that form the world around us.
Su Yu-Xin: Searching the Sky for Gold and Unearthed
January 31 – May 25, 2025
3333 Avenue of the Arts
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Tyler Stallings is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and curator based in Southern California. With over 30 years of experience, he has contributed to and edited numerous books and catalogs, offering insightful scholarship in contemporary art. To learn more about his work, visit www.tylerstallings.com.
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