In Venice, Su Xiaobai will fill a historic palazzo with works crafted in natural lacquer

Su Xiaobai’s Alchemical Universe, an official Collateral Event of the 61st Venice Biennale, opens this May at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel – a late-Gothic palazzo in Cannaregio built in 1473 for the noble Soranzo family, a stone’s throw from the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. The Van Axel in its name belongs to the Dutch merchant family who later acquired it – outsiders who bought their way into Venetian nobility. Their adopted palazzo, layered with centuries of competing histories, has become an apt setting for an artist who can compress twenty of them onto a single painting.

Su, born in Wuhan in 1949 and trained at both Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, abandoned oil paint in 2003 in favour of natural lacquer – a material historically confined to ritual objects and decorative surfaces – and has spent the two decades since pushing it toward contemporary abstraction. Curated by Stephen Little, Curator of Chinese Art at LACMA, and presented by the Su Xiaobai Foundation in collaboration with LACMA, the exhibition gathers 35 works spanning that entire arc.

The show is both a retrospective and a provocation. Its centrepiece Niao Niao, Su's newest series, is named for a poetic Chinese phrase evoking evanescence and transience. Monochromatic in mood – ranging from deep black through a register of barely-there greys – these works represent a deliberate act of reduction in which Su strips the lacquer of much of its oil content, adds mineral, shell and metallic powders, and lets the mixture flow freely across undulating surfaces with minimal intervention.

In fact, Su says there is a moment when a painting ceases to be solely his to determine. Even with the twenty layers of lacquer – scored, abraded, each in dialogue with the one beneath – the final image is never pre-designed. ‘The uncertainty does not lie in any single layer itself,’ he explains, ‘but in whether an unpredictable dialogue can emerge between them.’ It is a process that sounds less like painting and more like instinctive manoeuvring in that the artist may propose, but the material decides the outcome.

At that stage, Su says, a miracle occurs. Though the lacquer may now lack outward radiance, it appears ‘even more ethereal, magical, and elusive, like a faint wisp of smoke drifting in the wind’. Creation, he concludes, ‘is not always about what you do. Sometimes, it simply requires subtracting, purifying or even embracing futility.’

Not that there is anything remotely futile about this show. The installation across the palazzo's historic rooms is as orchestrated as the paintings are spontaneous.

Holding it all together spatially is Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture, the Thai architect whose Dib Bangkok – Thailand’s first international contemporary art museum – demonstrated his gift for buildings that host art rather than vie for attention.

Venice, though, he says, presents a different proposition because the palazzo possesses a characteristic integrity entirely its own. ‘It’s eccentric, singular, unrepeatable.’ Rather than suppress that quality, he has folded the palazzo's centuries of character into the exhibition design itself to reveal an unexpected resonance between building and artist. The palazzo's strata of history, he suggests, move in parallel with Su's layered surfaces.

The resulting spatial decisions are quietly ingenious. A glass floor laid beneath certain suspended works catches the canal light and throws it upward, so that the painted ceiling seems to bend downward, ghosting across the pieces below. In other rooms, works stand free of the walls, allowing the palazzo’s own mural decoration to wrap around them. Antique mirrors do the rest: angled to pull architectural details into the sight-lines of adjacent works, and in certain rooms, pitched outward to pull in the glittering canals themselves into the interior.

Eleven Niao Niao works hang against walls draped in white silk; three canvases lie flat above a floor of blue glass; others are suspended from steel wires. A special piece, Three Hundred Poems – composed of 300 antique ceramic roof tiles referencing an ancient Chinese poetry anthology – crosses millennia and continents to land in Cannaregio.

‘The breath of Renaissance artisans, the whispers of 19th-century residents, and the time crystalised within this 21st-century work suddenly exist on the same plane,’ Su says.

In the end, for all this philosophical introspection, Su, for his part, just wanted the right room. ‘I had a dream,’ he says. ‘I’d hoped my work could be displayed in a special place. Not a museum, not on a collector's wall.’

It turned out a Gothic palazzo on the canals of Venice was the answer.

'Su Xiaobai's Alchemical Universe’ at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, 9 May – 22 November