Katherine Qiyu Su: The Traces of the Feelings We Refuse to Release

What does it mean to stay in relation to something that no longer exists in the present? In Katherine Qiyu Su’s work, painting becomes a way of negotiating this question, transforming memory not into something fixed, but into something that can be revisited, reshaped, and quietly released.

Recently showcased at Incubator gallery in London with her exhibition Mountains and Rivers Will Meet Again, her practice unfolds within a space where emotional residue, perception, and imagination overlap. 

Your exhibition revolves around zhì niàn (执念)—a feeling that resists release. Do you experience painting as a way of holding onto these emotions, or as a way of gently transforming them into something that can exist outside of you?

For me, painting is more like a slow process of transformation. Things that come from the past, whether they are people who have left or emotions that once existed vividly, belong to the past and perhaps should remain there. But the regret, attachment, and emotional traces they leave behind do not simply disappear. Painting allows me to remain in relation to these experiences without having to fully immerse myself in them again.

When thoughts and emotions that once existed only through memory are transformed into images and given form, it feels like a kind of release. They no longer remain solely inside me, nor do they depend entirely on my remembering in order to exist. In that sense, painting becomes a way of letting go. At the same time, because these emotions are preserved in material form, painting also allows me to return to them. So for me, it always exists in a tension between letting go and holding on.

In my work, anxiety, avoidance, drifting thoughts, and unrest are not expressed as direct emotional outbursts. Instead, they are filtered through painting, obscured, reconstructed, fictionalized, and transformed into something that can be seen and contemplated. What I want to depict is not only my own attachment, but a more shared emotional condition of the present. The repeated motifs in my work feel like condensed fragments of memory, and I believe painting can give form to something intensely private while also opening it to resonance with others.

When you return to a place or a feeling through painting, how do you navigate the line between remembering and reimagining?

For me, memory is always more faithful to emotion than to fact. It does not preserve events with precision, but instead retains their psychological weight, atmosphere, and affective residue. So when I return to a place or a feeling through painting, what I am engaging with is not simple representation, but a memory that has already been filtered through the consciousness of the present. In this sense, returning through painting is not about accurately reconstructing the past, but about allowing present perception and past experience to overlap. The past and the present, what actually happened and what has since been inwardly reconstructed, all coexist within the image.

It is precisely through this process that the boundary between remembering and reimagining becomes less distinct. Painting is not a means of going back to the past in any literal or exact way; rather, it is a way of showing how we reinterpret the past from the position of the present, how we continually revise and reorganize it in the act of looking back, and ultimately transform it into an emotional reality that can be seen. Very often, what I can more readily perceive in the present is the anxiety of finding my way here, rather than the warmth that may once have existed in the past. It feels similar to the way one cannot possess youth and its awareness at the same time. Many things only reveal their full weight after they have already left us. When I look back, what I face is never a clear, complete moment that can be fully retrieved, but an experience that has already been reinterpreted and reorganized by the present. For that reason, in my paintings, the past and the present often appear layered together like a double exposure. What is seen in the present and what is recalled in memory permeate one another; what truly happened and what has later been inwardly reconstructed coexist. For me, there is no absolute line separating remembering from reimagining. Painting happens precisely within that indeterminate space.

There is a strong sense of in-betweenness in your practice—between cities, cultures, and emotional states. How has moving between Beijing and London shaped your practice?

Before coming to London, my painting was more concerned with indirect experience. In many ways, I was translating other people’s stories. I often kept a certain distance from experiences that felt too closely tied to my own life, because I carried a sense of insecurity about being seen through or interpreted too easily by people who knew me well.

During my first year in London, especially during my time at the RCA, I gradually began to bring the subject of painting back to myself. Changes in environment and experience allowed me, for the first time, to focus more steadily on things that felt deeply personal and immediate. It was also during this period that I found an outlet for expressing zhìniàn and began to understand more clearly the weight of memory and the past, as well as the sincerity within them that could resonate with others.

Moving between Beijing and London has been central to that shift. Growing up in Beijing, it has always been my comfort zone, though not necessarily in practice. It was only after leaving that I began to understand home as a fixed point, something I continually return to and look back toward. London, on the other hand, gave me a distance from that familiarity. It allowed me to rethink my relationship to the past and to confront more directly this sense of being in between.

For me, this in-betweenness is not only about moving between cities or shifting between cultures. It also exists in a self that is continuously in the process of becoming, always in transit, always on the way. In some sense, this feeling of being in between has become part of my painting method. It keeps me searching for a tension between intimacy and detachment, between private experience and shared feeling, and between memory and reality.

Absence feels almost tangible in your recent works, like something that has weight, rather than emptiness. What draws you to what is left unsaid or unseen?

I think this comes partly from a sense of restraint that has stayed with me since a young age. It is a way of not saying too much and not pushing things toward complete resolution. For me, what carries meaning is often not what is made fully explicit, but what is held back, what remains only partially said or seen.

Raw linen or negative space, in that sense, is never simply emptiness. It is a generative space. It can distil a specific idea into a more condensed image, while keeping the work open rather than fixing it into a single meaning. Precisely because something is not fully stated or shown, the painting can hold more ambiguity, more feeling, and more room for projection.

I am drawn to what is left unsaid or unseen because it carries a kind of inner resonance.It also allows the painting to breathe. Negative space creates a subtle tension between fragments, marks, textures, and intervals, so that looking becomes more than simply recognizing an object. It becomes a slower process of sensing, imagining, and gradually entering the work.

So in my recent paintings, absence is not the same as emptiness. It feels more like a presence with weight, or a silence that is still active. I think that is what continues to draw me to what is left unsaid or unseen, because it is often there that painting remains most open, and most closely connected to lived feeling.

In a world that constantly demands our attention, some emotions risk being overwritten. Do you see your practice as a way of protecting certain feelings, almost as an act of resistance against forgetting?

Yes, in a way, I see the process of creating paintings as a form of resistance against forgetting. But what it resists is not only forgetting itself. It also resists the speed and overstimulation of modern life, which constantly overwrites feelings and leaves very little room for emotions to stay with us for long. For me, painting is a way of making space for certain feelings that need more time, more weight, and more presence.

I have always been a nostalgic person, and perhaps because of that, I am especially sensitive to how easily emotion can now be diluted by the constant flow of information. In a world where so much is continuously available, updated, and replaced, even longing and regret can begin to lose some of their intensity. 

So painting becomes a slow form of resistance. It is a long conversation with our past selves, and an imagined message to those who will never have a chance to see the paintings themselves. Through my practice, I do not try to preserve emotion exactly as it was, but to protect its weight and duration, and to resist the way feeling is so often flattened or overwritten. In that sense, painting allows certain emotions to remain present long enough to be fully understood by ourselves and to resonate with others.

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Image courtesy of the artist & Incubator