Pears, Moth, and Brushes is an oil painting by Chinese-born, Pittsburgh-based artist Su Su, whose masterful, dreamlike images offer a unique perspective on intercultural exchange. Titled and composed in the fashion of a traditional still-life, the image includes one element not mentioned in the name: a self-portrait of the artist. Su Su includes herself in the painting as a gesture of empowerment, feminine power, and as a gift of generosity to the viewer that states how much more an artist has to offer than simple subject matter. In this painting, Su Su includes pears as a reference to a common element in classical Western still life paintings, and because the pears echo feminine bodily forms. Su Su’s practice is guided by the complicated and confusing experiences she has had as an immigrant to the United States. Her paintings bring together symbolic references, historical cues, and tidbits borrowed from mass media and pop culture to create a jittery, beautiful hybrid image with the capacity to re-shape our understanding of our interconnected world. This painting belongs to a body of work Su Su refers to as Bombyx paintings. The distinctive texture of this painting comes about through a technique of her own invention, in which she extrudes oil paints from behind the silk substrate, building the image in reverse. Gravity pulls the injected streams of oil paint downward, creating a phantasmagoric forest of hair-like projectiles from which the haunting, uncanny image emerges. Su Su developed this technique as a material celebration of paint itself. The name Bombyx comes from the work’s relationship to the Bombyx moth, which makes silk. The paintings exist on a silk substrate, and the injected streams of oil paint resemble the cilia-like hairs of a Bombyx moth. The name also references an experience Su Su had when working in the studio, when a moth flew in through the window and landed on one of her paintings. She liked the look of the moth on the painting, which led her to begin incorporating moths onto the surfaces of many of her Bombyx paintings. In this piece a moth is affixed to the lower right surface of the painting.