Nissa Kauppila’s Tidy Paintings Have a Messy History

Nissa Kauppila had been teaching at South Burlington High School when she took a sabbatical in 2015. The Monkton native was ready for an adventure and signed up for an artist residency in Shenzhen, China. But she never intended to stay.

The 43-year-old artist now lives in Hong Kong and recently visited Vermont for a few weeks to install her latest show, “Lap Sap: Tension and Transformation” at Soapbox Arts in Burlington. It’s on view through August 23.

Kauppila’s paintings are both delicate and fearless. Patterns and highly detailed natural imagery — birds, feathers, butterfly wings, monstera plant leaves — spill across uneven, three-dimensional reliefs. The edges look torn and the surfaces crumpled. A few include small square frames as part of the composition, all of which are ineffectual: Instead of containing the artwork, they have been overtaken by it.

A few months into that 2015 residency in Shenzhen, Kauppila said on a tour of her exhibition, she realized it wasn’t working out and decided to try living in China on her own. She quickly established a career working with traditional Chinese ink and watercolor on rice paper, becoming known for her imagery of endangered species. At a certain point, she said, she had to make a decision: “Go back to the U.S., or follow the art.”

Kauppila said that although most Vermonters might think of Hong Kong and picture densely packed skyscrapers, something like 70 percent of the region — which is made up of the Kowloon Peninsula and more than 200 islands — is jungle. She lives in a small village on Lantau Island, where forested mountain peaks are ringed by beachside towns. “People are very friendly; people know each other,” she said. “I kind of describe it as if you took Bristol, Vt., and put it in Asia.”

As in Vermont, outdoor recreation such as hiking and paddling is extremely popular in Hong Kong, and Kauppila does both. When hiking, she enjoys exploring abandoned villages, where the jungle has often grown over the architecture. Elements of that transformation have crept into her paintings, including a once-common pattern stamped on old privacy glass, or the blue-on-white vining flowers from Ming dynasty-esque wallpaper and pottery.

Kauppila said she spends at least four days a week on the ocean as a competitive canoe racer — an activity which spawned her current work, albeit by a circuitous route.

For years, the artist had her rice-paper paintings traditionally mounted before they were framed. This is a centuries-old practice in which the mounters soak the back of a finished painting with a seaweed-based adhesive, adding about four successive layers of rice paper and letting it fully dry each time while keeping it flat and free of bubbles. Kauppila works with her friend Tsang Chi Chung Jacky, whose family has maintained a reputation in the craft for several generations. She wanted to paint at a larger scale, she said, but to do that she felt she needed to understand the mounting process better — so she asked Tsang if he and his dad would teach her.

Meanwhile, Kauppila was also maintaining fiberglass outrigger canoes for her paddling team, repairing dings, sanding and repainting them as needed. The two techniques started to come together in her head, and after about six months of experimentation, she was mounting rice paper paintings to fiberglass substrates, pushing the boundaries of her previous work. She said she started to ask new questions, such as “How do I create something that looks delicate, almost like a piece of garbage — like a discarded piece of paper towel you’d see on the sidewalk?”

Garbage might seem like odd inspiration, but it makes thematic sense in the show, so much so that its title, “Lap Sap,” translates to “rubbish.” Trash is a massive problem in China, particularly in Hong Kong. After big storms, Kauppila recalled, the beach is often buried in a thick layer of garbage.

Some of the most ubiquitous pieces of refuse are heavy-duty woven plastic bags, used for everything from rice to construction sand. Kauppila kept finding them, she said, and started thinking, “What if I found materials that would act like fiberglass, but could be sourced by reusing some of this debris?”

The resulting body of work grapples with ideas about what we discard and forget as much as the losses we mourn. In one piece, a songbird lies broken against a bright yellow background; leaves and vines seem to be growing over two square openings, reminiscent of holes in a concrete wall. In another, monarch butterflies emerge from a broken window; Chinese characters printed on the woven bag are visible in places, proclaiming the painting “good quality.”

Kauppila titles her paintings with longitude and latitude, either of a site that inspired the work or the location where she began painting it. The tie to a specific place is a good counterbalance to the atmospheric, emotional quality of the imagery.

The earliest works on display are flatter and a little more restrained in their construction, with the structures growing more organic and bolder in more recent paintings. “I wanted it to feel a bit chaotic,” Kauppila said. “When you’re in the jungle and you see these abandoned places, everything’s falling apart; nothing’s at right angles anymore.”

Though there is a larger movement lately toward making sustainable artwork, Kauppila’s stands apart because she skillfully weaves elegant aesthetics and patient techniques with the overlooked or unpalatable — trash, insects, little brown birds. She gravitates, she said, to creatures that are “fragile but extremely powerful, at the same time.” It’s a description that sums up her paintings precisely.

This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.

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