Shuo Yin
Interview by James Harris
I loved seeing your paintings in person. They have a commanding presence, and they really deal with identity in a very fascinating way. Where did you get the subject matter for both of those large scale paintings?
They are part of an ongoing project I’m doing about my identity. It’s a topic that I’ve been interested in since coming into graduate study. I’ve been making portraits of myself in different contexts.
I’m an immigrant to the United States, an international student born in China. The cultural differences between the two countries changes the way I live and the way I think. That plays a really important role in the planning and execution of all those works.
In the latest pieces, the images are directly coming from me and my wife’s driver’s licenses. That’s why they have numbers, stencils, and seals on them.
The driver’s license in China?
No, it’s a Washington state driver’s license for myself, and it’s my wife’s California state driver’s license.
When you think about an ID, it’s usually a small scale, intimate picture. You seem interested in breaking down that scale and kind of obscuring the image of the person. It seems related to memory and history, perhaps obscuring the history.
I’m glad you brought up the point about history. History has played a really important role in how I became the person I am today. I was educated in the Chinese system where a lot of information, like Tiananmen Square and the Cultural Revolution, was censored. I had almost zero knowledge of those things, so I grew up a patriot of China.
After I came abroad, I got exposed to all kinds of information. I began to have lots of questions about Chinese history but also about personal history, how these can be altered during documentation, like getting a driver’s license.
In terms of size, it relates to nation over individual versus individual over nation. In China, the nation comes first. Humanity is not a single individual. It’s more about collective benefits rather than individual rights, civil rights. I want my paintings to encourage discussion about those topics. That’s why the paintings are so big, roughly a hundred times the original size of the photo on the long dimension. They’re portraits of a human being made from a single person.
So, by enlarging the image, the details fade. You’re referencing the driver’s license, but it becomes distorted, mysterious. There’s a recognizable image of a face, but what makes us unique individuals? The details are implied, but they’re obscured and hidden in this beautiful, watery painting. That’s very purposeful. You want to talk about identity, but you want to hide it, too. You’re walking a fine line, creating a presence for this individual, but the presence seems to be fading.
The central idea I’m trying to pull out in these two pieces is that I feel like humanity in today’s world is diluted. I mean, people talk about it all the time, but it doesn’t matter that much to too many people. I’m trying to move away from the representation of a one single human being. I want to move beyond the limit of representation in this way.
There’s a great tradition of portraiture in both the West and the East. Have you always been a figurative painter?
Yeah. I’ve been interested in human figures since I became devoted to a professional career as a painter when an undergrad. I did portraits as an undergraduate, but I’ve focused more on heads and facial expressions as a graduate student. I’m using a photo as a reference for these thesis paintings, but I’m not trying to copy the photo. We have printers for that. I was trying to wash away some parts of the characters.
Are these paintings a diptych?
Yes.
That’s important. I saw them as two individual works. It’s fascinating that the paintings are paired and you two are paired because you’re married, but there is also a separation since there are markings from two different places: Washington and California. Also, each panel has different types of surface mark making. Talk about the differences between the two and your decisions to do it that way?
For my painting, the patterns are based somewhat on what’s seen in the original photo, but they became a study of my different experiences in the East and West. On the right are the horizontal lines, everything aligned, like the collectivity in China. On the left are all kinds of curvy lines that represent the freedom and diversity in the United States.
For the other piece, I followed mostly the composition of the original photo with the seal and number. I did cut away some of the edges to make it fill the frame like this. She goes to school at UC Riverside, so we spent almost two years apart, seeing each other monthly. I kind of felt like she was with me when I worked on this piece.
Did you take the IDs and enlarge them to get some of the mark details, or was that just a creative decision on your part?
I took a photocopy of the driver’s licenses then I cropped out the photo part of the ID and enlarged that to the size of a laptop screen. I printed that out to see how it changed from the original size. Next I made a bigger oil sketch to determine how it looks even larger. This gave me enough confidence to do the full-size canvas. As I’m painting, the image moves farther and farther from the original small photo, so I have to work with the process and figure it out as I go.
So, you’re looking at the original, the enlargement, and painted studies as you conceptualize the painting?
During the process, I may do a dozen studies just to figure out different colors, like warm or cool values, the size of the letters and patterns, and other stuff. It’s not just a copy of an image. I’m making it something different than the photo.
You’re purposely choosing these cooler colors. It’s like you’re using the colors to almost give a sense of nostalgia.
My experiments included some that were warmer, like yellowish and reddish, and some that were cooler. I even made a monochromatic version using black. I agree with what you say about nostalgia, but I think the final color helps make it less emotional in terms of identity issues while still keeping a personal connection with the subject matter.
Did you title this painting?
No, I didn’t, it’s currently untitled. I’m still figuring out.
Because of the color and the way you’ve handled the paint on the surface, it makes me think these could be from the past. We don’t know whether or not they’re contemporary people; there is a sort of mystery to them. I think you’re trying to make identity more universal. Are we supposed to empathize with the subjects? It’s as if their identity has been hidden or washed away.
Yeah. I think I have the obligation as an artist to empathize with all those people who are suffering in the current world, whether it’s in China, the United States, or elsewhere. I think artists should bring to public attention the suffering taking place in the world. It’s about making the world a better place not about relaxation or entertainment. That intention is always in my mind when I work.
I took reference from the painted family photographs by Gerhard Richter. He left East Germany with a lot of family photos, and he painted on many of them.
But yours are more atmospheric, I would say. Also, your paintings are meticulous and thoughtfully painted. I don’t mean there’s an exactitude, but there is a degree of beauty to them. Are you interested in the idea of beauty?
My interpretation of beauty has changed as I’ve moved along the way I practice. Beauty is a thing that I pursue, but it’s more like the beautiful side of humanity.
I think that beauty is something that can be underneath the composition, and it gives us humanity, both joy and sadness. To experience joy, you also have to experience sadness.
The viscous or liquid quality of the paint in these works appears to be something that interests you and maybe even brings you joy. It’s almost like a watercolor. Is that correct?
You see that as similar to watercolor work? I spent time in Singapore last summer for a residency program. While there, I made a series of about sixty watercolor portraits of just the heads. They were pedestrians I saw on the streets. The watercolors were easy to carry and it was a way to document my experience there. At the very beginning, everything I painted was very tight, very intense, still focused on the structure of the face and the light. After a while, I opened up and loosened up. I became more interested in the fluidity of the facial features, and the paintings became more abstract. This got me thinking about doing this at a larger scale and in oil, trying to use oil paint like watercolors.
In the paintings of you and your wife, it is like you have multiple layers, with the faded image of the person and the surface treatment. There is a push / pull effect between those and a visual depth. I love that there’s a dialogue between the surface and the image. It’s like the surface commodifies a person as an ID while underneath is the soul of the person.
Those seals and numbers are important to the conversation. Without those elements, it’s just two portraits, nothing special. In some early versions of the paintings, I ignored them, so I’m glad I included the numbers and seals. It adds to the duality I was trying to capture in these paintings.
When you hang the paintings together, have you thought about which portrait is going on the right and which one’s going on the left?
Wow. That’s a good question. To be honest, I never thought about that.
You need to think about that because it changes everything compositionally depending on which is on the right or left.
I see now that it makes a difference. I’ll have to think about that more. To be honest, the original plan was to make a triptych. Because of the shutdown, I’ve postponed the third one. I think I’m going to make it over the summer if things work out.
Was the third painting going to be based on another ID?
It’s going to be based on a selfie I took of me wearing an N95 mask. I took it the first day I heard about the COVID-19 outbreak in China. [Shows him a preliminary sketch.] I was thinking about using printmaking techniques to make the surface patterns, which might be a reference to the virus shape.
The portrait with the mask is very different from the other two. I’m thinking you should keep the two together and have the mask painting be separate because it deals with different issues.
Yeah. The more I work on those three, the more I think that way too. I may put the three paintings in next year’s thesis exhibition.
Oh, that would be fantastic.