In Beijing it’s a common sight, especially after one of the spring windstorms. Adorning cars, windows, even your furniture, there’ll be a fine coating of the stuff left when the wind dies down. Some think it’s dirty, but young artist Su Zhiguang finds it “beautiful.” Now he’s turned one of Beijing’s most common features, the all-encompassing dust into works of art, and he has his own exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) until July 10.

Su collected dust and dirt from 256 crossroads from three locations in Beijing. He made patterns of insects or flowers, and then sprayed them with gold paint. His unique raw material and approach raised the interest of internationally-acclaimed artist Gu Wenda. Gu recommended him to UCCA for the 12th installment of the center’s long-term art talent project “Curated by…”, together with artist Li Hui and famed Swiss sculptor Not Vital.

“In respect of an artist, I chose Su for his artistic creativity and his thinking, which is quite different from the perspective of some other curators or critics. Dust and dirt are the eternal things in people’s lives, especially us, descendants of the yellow earth. And it’s like a recycling circle to use dust to paint trees,” Gu said.  

Su says that using dust and dirt in art started from his dissertation research when he was an undergraduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2008. He wanted to transform a mundane substance into an artistic medium, imbuing it with a renewed significance.

“I think about the fact that every artist wants to make their work so clean that his trace on it can’t be seen or found. But the artwork must carry the whole psychological thought process during the creative process. So what can viewers read from any work that has already been cut to the least? In that case, I would rather say the exhibition hall needs to be clean, but the work doesn’t,” said the 28-year-old artist.

Three of Su’s works are exhibited, including Dust Manual, Dust Tiles and Dust Insects, Dust Flowers. Among them, Dust Manual, an elegant volume of 46 “sketches” rendered in dust, is the most splendid one, reminiscent of Mustard Seed Garden, an early Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) painting.

“These works reveal material drift and humanist notions of survival, as well as the cross-pollination of Eastern and Western culture,” said curator Gu,  who chose the name Drift for Su’s debut show.

Su, who was born in Guangdong Province, is now working on his master’s degree at CAFA. He chose to offer a relatively independent means of documenting the truth about human history through his first solo show.

“Like an urban anthropologist, Su collects and archives the detritus of our floating lives, painstakingly cataloguing the samples for posterity. His creation is a fragile codex, a text whose wisdom seems destined to fade away,” said Jér?me Sans, UCCA Director.

You can also see:

Full On exhibition at UCCA will tell the life of famed Swiss sculptor Not Vital in Beijing with a series of  never-before-exhibited oil on canvas portraits until July 10.

Have fun with artist Li Hui’s V, a laser installation designed specifically for the UCCA until July 10.