Yizhen Shen (b. 2003, Shanghai, China) is a painter based in Shanghai. In Shen’s paintings, eccentric shapes swell, tilt, droop, contort, and wiggle, animated through a slow process of reworking. Childlike wonder meets moments of offbeat humor, sustaining a practice devoted to the joyous, strange, and magical act of painting. For Shen, painting is a way of losing oneself in a grand bazaar of love.

In Shen's works, colors refuse to yield to one another, shapes overlap and obscure each other, generating shifting spatial, poetic and political relations. Geometric structures, bodily curves, varied surfaces, and intentionally unresolved passages come together to form a strange and playful dance.

Studying the Persian language and trans-cultural experiences remain ongoing sources of inspiration in his practice. The spatial logic of miniature painting, along with childhood experiences of origami and weaving, continues to shape the way he sees and organizes a painting. For him, painting is a incremental process in which space, time, and bodies gradually emerge through repeated covering, revision, and deviation, far from the realization of
a predetermined image.

Yizhen Shen (b. 2003, Shanghai, China) lives and works in Shanghai. He received a BFA in Painting with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025. He recently presented a solo exhibition at Arthereistanbul in Istanbul, Türkiye. Recent solo exhibitions include Nighttime Playground. He was awarded the Florence Leif Award from the RISD Painting Department in 2025. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Providence, RI, US, where his work has been shown across a range of independent contexts.