Qin Shen (b. 2001) is a Brooklyn-based artist from Changshu, China. Primarily working in painting, her practice also extends into mixed-media printmaking and sculpture. Her work explores memory, bodily sensation, and the shifting relationship between past and present, often focusing on ephemeral experiences and the traces they leave behind in the body, objects, and places. She received her MFA in Fine Arts and BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Shen has exhibited at venues including the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, Helm Contemporary, and FLOHAUS Gallery. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Asian Art Contemporary, ArtEchive, Bold Journey, Atopia Art Magazine, and Canvas Rebel.
Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?
I was born and raised in Changshu, a small town near Shanghai, China. I developed an interest in art very early in life and was constantly drawing, crafting, and experimenting with different materials as a child. My parents were quite open to letting me explore creatively, so I grew up playing with crayons, colored pencils, clay, and whatever materials I could find. By high school, I had already decided that I wanted to pursue art in college.
I grew up moving between the city and the countryside where my grandparents lived. Being close to nature, and especially witnessing my grandparents’ practical, farmer-like way of living, profoundly shaped how I perceive the world. I became attentive to subtle changes, the marks left by touch, weather, labor, time, and ordinary daily experiences. I think this sensitivity to traces and small details has stayed with me and continues to influence my work.
A sense of drifting also developed quite early in my life. I grew up in an environment where I was often encouraged to strive for perfection and suppress pain in pursuit of a better result. When external expectations became overwhelming, I tended to turn inward. There has always been a very soft and sensitive part of me that absorbs the world intensely. Over time, I became an independent explorer, even while struggling with questions of belonging. I moved to Shanghai and later to New York for school, and I have lived independently since I was sixteen. I studied Illustration for my BFA and later pursued an MFA in Fine Arts because I increasingly felt the need to use art not simply as image-making, but as a way to process emotions, sensations, and lived experience.
Today, my practice explores time, the body, memory, and sensation through painting, mark-making, touch, and materiality. Experiences of movement and cultural displacement also enter the work. Through making, I try to construct a separate kind of time-space—one in which memories, sensations, and experiences that may belong to different moments can coexist.
How do you stay inspired and motivated to create new work?
I usually begin a new work when I feel an urgent need to express something, even when I cannot immediately identify what that feeling is.
My thoughts often return to what I imagine as a storage system of memories. I mentally open one room after another, searching through fragments and traces for something I may have overlooked. Sometimes I do not even know what I am looking for; there is simply an impulse to investigate further, as if I could retrieve something certain from an experience that has already passed. Some of these fragments eventually become scenes in my paintings.
Over the past few years, my attention has also turned increasingly toward my own body. I have always had an unusual sensitivity to physical sensation. During periods of emotional stress, sensations in the body can become a way of locating myself in the present. After moving to the United States, I began experiencing stress-related skin reactions: redness, irritation, swelling, and temporary marks caused by scratching or crying. I started observing these changes very closely.
Rather than seeing these marks only as injuries or imperfections, I began painting them in vivid colors. I think of each mark almost as a constellation—temporary evidence that an emotion or sensation once existed. Together, they form a kind of private galaxy that travels with me.
I am also interested in combining multiple times and spaces within one painting. A disrupted dream, an urban scene from New York, a rural landscape from my childhood in China, or something I encountered while traveling might return to me at a similar emotional moment. I bring these places together until their boundaries begin to dissolve.
Because of this, my paintings rarely have one fixed narrative. While painting, my position often shifts from being the person who originally experienced an event to becoming a third-person observer or reader of it. The act of painting changes my relationship to the experience itself. It allows me to look again at what has accumulated within me as I move through different places and periods of my life.
Sometimes I trace the shadows of objects as sunlight moves across the surface of a painting. Memory can be immersive, and at times I worry about becoming too absorbed in it. Tracing something physically present becomes a way of anchoring myself back in the current moment.
Nature and Buddhist philosophy are also important sources of energy for me. Spending time in mountains, open fields, or quiet natural environments helps me slow down enough to notice extremely subtle changes around me. Reading and studying Buddhist texts, particularly the Diamond Sutra, has also influenced how I think about impermanence, attachment, and the shifting nature of the self. These moments of stillness often return me to a more genuine creative state.
How has your artistic style evolved over time?
I am primarily a painter now, but before focusing on oil painting, I worked much more extensively with mixed-media sculpture, printmaking, observational drawing, and found materials. These practices have not disappeared; they continue to influence the way I approach painting.
Collecting has always been important to me. Because I have moved frequently—between homes, cities, and countries—I have repeatedly had to decide which objects I could carry forward with me and which ones I had to leave behind. That process made me particularly aware of the emotional weight objects can acquire.
I regard objects and sites as vessels containing both lived experience and evidence of what has already happened. When a meaningful place or object disappears, its absence can become a trace in itself. In that sense, a ruin can emerge at the exact moment we recognize that something once meaningful is no longer there. This has led to recurring questions in my work: Are we living in the past or the present? Are we remnants of what once existed, or extensions of its ongoing transformation?
In my mixed-media monoprints and installations, I use objects and materials collected from both China and New York, from urban spaces as well as natural environments. My process often involves repetitive gestures such as collecting, sorting, coating, pressing, and layering. Through accumulation and erosion, these actions become a way of processing memory without forcing it into a fixed narrative. I allow materials, emotions, and associations to react freely in the moment.
Eventually, the meditative quality of collecting and sorting led me toward painting. Painting gave me another way to examine what happens when a past experience and my present state briefly slide across one another. It has gradually become the central part of my practice, while the material sensitivity I developed through printmaking and sculpture remains deeply embedded in how I construct an image.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being creative in your experience?
The most rewarding part of being an artist is having a visual language through which I can express things that are difficult to articulate otherwise.
For me, art is not only an outlet for emotion. Making allows me to understand myself differently, to reconsider my relationship with past experiences, and to become more attentive to the world around me. Sometimes I begin a work without fully understanding what I am trying to process, and the meaning only becomes visible through the act of making.
That process of discovering something about myself while creating it is probably what keeps me returning to art.
What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges I am facing as an emerging artist is financial sustainability. Finding a balance between maintaining a serious studio practice and supporting myself has become an important part of my life.
I have also faced a lack of understanding from my family regarding the artistic path I chose for myself, which has affected my relationship with them. Learning to continue despite that absence of recognition has been difficult, but it has also forced me to become much more certain about why I make art.
At the moment, I have a full-time job outside the art field, and I try to spend as much of my remaining time as possible working in my studio. Surprisingly, having less time has sometimes made that time feel even more valuable. Instead of seeing life outside the studio purely as an interruption, I have begun to recognize that it also gives me new experiences, observations, relationships, and material to bring back into my work.
The challenges have not made me less committed to art. If anything, they have clarified how essential art is to the life I want to build.
What advice would you give to emerging artists trying to establish themselves?
Do not let other people’s words define who you are or what your life is supposed to look like.
I have encountered a great deal of doubt and dismissal, but those experiences eventually helped me understand more clearly what I genuinely want. It is important to listen to advice and remain open to change, but there is a difference between learning from others and allowing their expectations to determine your direction.
The future is uncertain for everyone. I think that uncertainty can also be liberating. Your life is something you continue constructing through the decisions you make, and as an artist, you have to give yourself permission to imagine possibilities that other people may not yet be able to see.
Text and photo courtesy of Qin Shen
Website: https://www.qinshen.studio/
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