Winnie Weiyun Szu – SAIC Graduation Exhibition 2026

SAIC SHOWS 2026 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2026 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Winnie Weiyun Szu

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Painting and Drawing

Graduate Exhibition One

winnieszu0608@gmail.com

winnieweiyunszu.com

Book of Hours

Winnie Weiyun Szu (b. 2001, Taipei) is a painter and interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. She holds a BFA from Taipei National University of the Arts and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Shaped by a life of constant relocation, Szu’s practice explores abstraction and landscape as perceptual and psychological spaces rather than sites of representation. Living with aphantasia, she does not work from visual memory; instead, her paintings function as sensory fields constructed through gesture, material, and atmosphere. She often describes her work as “landscapes of nowhere,” where horizon, depth, and light operate as stabilizing structures within states of flux. Influenced by both East Asian ink traditions and Western painting, her practice extends across painting, drawing, and moving image.
Her work has been exhibited at EXPO Chicago, Epiphany Center for the Arts, and the Keelung Museum of Art, and has been featured in New American Paintings MFA Annual Issue #177, China Times, and Taishin ARTalks.

Winnie Weiyun Szu - bolt

bolt, 2024, oil paint on stretched canvas, 15 x 12 in.

Winnie Weiyun Szu - Something about the weather

Something about the weather, 2025, mix medium on unstretched canvas, 15 x 23 ft.

Winnie Weiyun Szu - dunes

dunes, 2025, oil and charcoal on canvas, 40 x 60 in.

Winnie Weiyun Szu - A place in the sun

A place in the sun, 2025, mix medium on unstretched canvas, 9.5 x 13.8 ft.

Winnie Weiyun Szu - it is impossible to create a meaningless sequence

it is impossible to create a meaningless sequence, 2025, Charcoal, makers, acrylic paint, staples, unstretched canvas, 40 x 17 in.

the skin of the moon is green as cheese, 2025, video installation, 10 mins.

Built around my poem, this piece drifts between humor and unease, weaving everyday thoughts with reflections on lateness, arrival, and belonging. The images are haptic rather than illustrative—skin imagined as cheese, paint, snow, or shadow. These shifting skins speak to the instability of race, gender, and identity, recognizing skin color as something both intimate and political. The work resists linearity, forming a tactile field where the untellable—body, vision, and time—lingers as sensation more than story.

finding birdie, 2024, video, 7mins.

This video reflects on the relationship between imagery, craft, and time—why we record and preserve fleeting moments. Using printmaking processes, I translated still frames from video into prints and reinserted them into the timeline. Each translation slows time and reshapes memory, revealing how form and stillness can turn transience into presence.

I am a third-culture artist living between worlds, where identities blur and meanings remain unsettled. My work emerges from this in-between state: an ongoing negotiation between perception, memory, and belonging. Living with aphantasia, I do not recall images; instead, I construct sensory landscapes through gesture, material, and time, allowing abstraction to become a way of locating myself in a world I cannot visualize.

I return to landscape not as a place to depict, but as a feeling to inhabit. Horizons drift, surfaces open and close, and depth becomes emotional rather than geographic. The sun and moon appear as quiet anchors, celestial rhythms that offer steadiness within flux, mirroring the layered interior terrain of displacement.

Across painting, drawing, moving image, and writing, I intertwine abstraction with fragments of language, folding logographic and phonetic forms into the surface. Mark-making becomes a way of indicating space. Words dissolve into marks; marks become breath. My work seeks not to resolve these ambiguities but to revel in their vitality.

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