Xiangmei Su is a multimedia artist from China who now lives in Canada. She received her BA in Visual Art at UBC. She works with installation, painting, photography, and video. Su has exhibited several solo and group shows in both China and Canada. Her first solo show (The Wind) was exhibited in Changshu Art Museum in China in 2012. Now, Su is an artist-in-residence in Dr. Sun Yet- Sen Classical Chinese Garden from January 28th to June 30th, 2022. Her current solo show (Intangible Thread – Part Two) is presented at the Garden. She has published two catalogues. In 2020, she was invited for a Tedx Talk, Becoming Who I Am. In 2022, she was invited to be an Exhibition Advisor for West Vancouver Community Art’s Council’s Jury for Exhibitions at the Kay Meek Art Centre.
Her art practices deal with the relations between spaces (cultural, natural, social and individual) and her own cultural identity. The subject of immigration is the one that holds personal meaning for her. Like other immigrants, from her hometown, Changshu, China to Vancouver, Canada, she has been crossing borders and cultures, struggling with the formation of a transnational identity and re-identifying herself as Chinese-Canadian. As a new immigrant in Canada, she experienced both peace and conflict. On one hand, she need to learn and understand the newness in order to fit into her host country. On the other hand, she always feels the primordial pull of her origin. Notions of identity and belonging are consistently in flux and are always being renegotiated by the individual. After struggling between these two cultures for years, she realized that it was impossible and unreasonable for her to actually have a single cultural identity. She started to ask herself what it would be like to live ‘in-between’ spaces, cultures and countries. She eventually shifted to a different investigation of her cultural identity within a new space. She found herself transforming as space and time interweaved to produce complex configurations of individuality and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. These notions combine and overlap to form her new transcultural identities.