Su Xiaobai: Blue: Su Xiaobai Solo Exhibition

What the Loved Ones See

The blue Su Xiaobai paints does not really count as painting.

We came out of the Boesner art supplies store, heavy bags loaded with bottles of pigments. More than half of the store shelves were cleared out. “The British brand I picked this time is a bit pricey,” he said with an apologetic smile as we paid. I actually don’t believe that a brand more expensive than Sennelier will help make better paintings. Somehow he read my mind, pressed my hand and said in earnest, “This time I won’t make paintings. I’ll paint the color spectrum.”

There is a term in his notebook: Ulysses blue. I don’t know where he came across this term, quietly written in a tiny notebook left by Bailing. There is no such a thing as Ulysses blue in the color spectrum.

Such blue exists not in the color spectrum, but in a book published in 1922, titled Ulysses: the blue of its cover. Ever since we and our friend Lao Kong chanced upon the first edition of the book at Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 2022, Xiaobai has nicknamed this indescribable blue as Ulysses blue. And he has not stopped trying to re-create this shade of blue. Several times when he got back from the studio, the only words he uttered were: “Today I just painted blue.”

The cover of Ulysses is actually a pastel shade of Greek blue. Standing on Platform 1 at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris, Sylvia Beach — the owner of Shakespeare and Company — awaited the arrival of a steam train from Dijon. Two copies of the book fresh from the printing factory, permeated with the smell of ink, were on their way as a birthday gift to the destitute author James Joyce on his birthday, February 2, 1922. Revealed from inside the delivery person’s coat, the copies were stuffed into Beach’s hands, still warmed by the body that had carried them all along.

No one could paint a shade of blue that carries the warmth of a body.

When it comes to blue, I’m always reminded of how Xiaobai was lost in thought after he’d seen the blue in frescoes:

The Annunciation by Fra Angelico at the San Marco Museum in Florence, Italy.

The mural of Feast Outing in the tomb of Xu Xianxiu, Northern Qi dynasty in Taiyuan, Shanxi, China.

The Hall of the Months at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy.

The day he’d seen the frescoes, he paced up and down the stone steps, drenched in sweat, as if he’d just been fished out of the water. The blue he’d painted, ever since that day, had fallen short of his expectations of what blue is or should be. Do you still need to hear the reason why he painted Impression of Florence? The Tina Keng Gallery in Neihu, Taipei, Taiwan has five floors: B1, 1F, 2F, and 4F. There’s 3F, too. But the third floor doesn’t count as part of the gallery’s exhibition space. Not really. That’s why Xiaobai has made the bold move of showing his monochrome paintings on the third floor. This unveiling of his new work is titled Su Xiaobai: Blue.

If there’s a next time of an exhibition like this, it should be titled: Su Xiaobai: White, Su Xiaobai: Gray, or Su Xiaobai: Red, Yellow, and Black… No, none of these sounds right. If there’s a next time, it should be titled “Su Xiaobai: Shuimo.”

— Xiaobai’s family