From the beginning of her college education, Susie knew she was interested in studying Chinese contemporary art. Through a combination of Chinese language, history, and art history classes, as well as a number of museum and gallery internships (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Williamson Gallery, and Ink Studio Gallery in Beijing, to name a few), Susie shaped her education to fit her niche focus. At Scripps, she majored in Art History and Studio Art, and wrote theses on mental health and the art of Yayoi Kusama, as well as the exhibiting of contemporary Chinese ink art in Western spaces. Following her graduation from Scripps in 2015, she was accepted into a master’s program in contemporary Chinese art history at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she studied under esteemed scholars Ros Holmes and Wenny Teo.
Her dissertation, on the subject of feminism and alter egos in the work of artists Chen Lingyang and Cao Fei, was informed by classes in video art and feminist theory which Susie took while attending Scripps. In 2016, she returned to Los Angeles, where she began interning in the Chinese and Korean Art Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Since beginning at LACMA, she has worked closely with the Gérard and Dora Cognié Collection of Art, a promise gift of 400 works of or in resonance with Chinese contemporary ink painting, and Susie has been promoted to a curatorial assistant position. Recently, Susie co-curated and installed LACMA’s iteration of The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China (June 2, 2019–January 5, 2020). She is now working on a number of future projects to bring Chinese contemporary art to LACMA, including collaborative projects between LACMA and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai.