Be Your Mirror is an oil painting by Chinese-born, Pittsburgh-based artist Su Su. The image portrays mirrored double images of Su Su’s face. Among Su Su’s artist inspirations is German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer, who famously painted himself as Christ. For Su Su, this was an act of confidence that artists have more to offer than their subject matter. By painting herself into her images, Su Su is literally giving audiences her own body and essence. Her painting process is complicated and labor-some, leaving traces of her own pain and exhaustion behind in the work. That is particularly true with this painting, which belongs to a body of work Su Su refers to as Bombyx paintings. Using a technique of her own invention, she creates these works by extruding oil paints from behind the canvas, working in reverse. Gravity pulls the injected streams 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. 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.