Susan Wu is a Los Angeles-based painter and trained interior architect whose oil paintings trace an interior landscape shaped by movement, solitude, and a lifelong search for peace. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Tokyo, Susan’s life has unfolded across Shanghai, London, Taipei, San Francisco, and back to Tokyo before returning to California. Growing up between cultures profoundly shaped the way she understands herself and the spaces she inhabits.
“I’ve always been a foreigner,” she reflects. Rather than anchoring herself to a single cultural identity, Susan learned early on to find stability within the mind, body, and the quiet space between thoughts. Her paintings emerge from this practice. What she calls inner sanctuaries are not literal rooms or landscapes, but mental states that are warm, dark, private, and calm she can access regardless of place, language, or circumstance.
Susan’s dual practice in painting and architecture informs her sensitivity to space, balance, and composition. Though she once saw the disciplines as separate — architecture as functional and external, painting as intuitive and internal — she now approaches both through the same philosophy. “Both are about harmony,” she says. “Both are about the relationship between the body and space.” In her paintings, harmony reveals itself slowly, built through layering, restraint, and attention.
Growing up in Tokyo as the child of Chinese and Taiwanese parents, the artist spent long hours alone while her parents worked. She recalls poring over books of Renaissance paintings, which she described as dark, mythological, and emotionally dense imagery that lingered long before she could fully understand it. Solitude became formative, where painting offered a way to process it, developing into a deeply personal visual language for refuge.
Light plays a central role in Susan’s work, though not as a symbol of purity or optimism, but rather as a means of focusing inward. In her paintings, light marks where the mind rests when navigating darkness. “It’s about shining light on different parts of your mind,” she explains, “and finding the one place that’s quieter than the rest.” Extended camping trips and time spent outdoors, alongside her architectural and painting practice, transformed her relationship to darkness and night, reshaping how she sees subtle light. She mentions seeds buried beneath damp soil and pearls resting at the bottom of the ocean as recurring metaphors reflecting a kind of dormant peace.
She defines visual fragments absorbed through memory as “recycled images,” reflecting a broader inquiry into how images live within us. Kung fu films, Renaissance paintings, architectural forms influence surface not as references but as subconscious residue. “I try to paint what the world looks like with my eyes closed,” she says, allowing layered histories to coexist quietly on the canvas. After studying art in San Francisco, she stepped away from painting for years while building a career in architecture in Tokyo. Painting remained alive internally until she returned to it with renewed clarity. When she did, the practice became slower and a form of meditation. Knowing when to stop, she says, is the hardest part in painting, architecture, and life.
The artist recently presented her first solo exhibition in LA at Soot Gallery, marking a significant moment in the public unfolding of this deeply internal practice. Several works from that exhibition, alongside new paintings, will be on view at the upcoming Agathus showroom, offering viewers an opportunity to encounter these inner landscapes in a space designed for reflection and presence.
Her hope is to remind viewers of something familiar: a quiet, private place of their own. “We’re all living in bodies,” she says. “That experience is shared.” If her work can momentarily return someone to that state, then it has done its work.
See more of her works at suwuarchive.com