You've Got a Little Something is an oil painting by Chinese-born, Pittsburgh-based artist Su Su. The image shows Chinese leader Mao Zedong grinning enigmatically while wearing a colorful, whimsical Hawaiian shirt. On his face is his signature mole, which now bears an image on its tip of Su Su’s face. It’s said that Mao did not gain his mole until he became leader, which can be interpreted as perhaps a sign of stress, or maybe a signifier of power. The title references the common phrase spoken when trying to alert someone that they have something on their face that needs to be wiped off.

This work belongs to a body of work Su Su refers to as her Extrusion Paintings.The technique she uses for these works is of her own invention. Working on a fine mesh fabric known as tulle, she sets the stretched surface upside down atop a sawhorse, and places a mirror beneath it on the floor. She then uses a syringe to carefully inject oil paint from behind the surface, through the tiny holes in the fabric. Gravity pulls the injected streams downward, creating a phantasmagoric, petrified forest of oil paint flagella from which haunting, uncanny images emerge. Su Su developed the technique as a material celebration of paint itself.

Su Su’s work offers a new and unique understanding of intercultural exchange—a jittery, beautiful hybrid of mass media, pop culture, history, and memory with the capacity to shape our understanding of our interconnected world. By blending references to American cultural icons such as the iconic Hawaiian shirt with images from Chinese art history, such as this portrait of Mao, these works speak to the complicated and confusing experiences Su Su has had as an immigrant to the United States. A distorted, swirling world of liquified pop iconographies and Chinese symbolism melts together with Su Su’s face and body, reflecting her struggle with the misunderstandings that shape the way China and the United States understand and portray each other’s cultures.