Shen Chen — Recent Works

 

Matthew Liu Fine Arts presents Shen Chen — Recent Works. Decades after Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Shen navigates his passage between New York and Shanghai, probing what remains when language is exhausted. His practice is not an expansion of form, but a descent in depth—a continual exploration of the same coordinates along new dimensions. The exhibition crystallizes this pursuit: near-transparent paintings—grayer, quieter, more ambiguous—press close to the essence of emptiness. Viewing them is to enter a space without temporal trace, where each gaze becomes a meditation of the spirit.

 

Shen’s artistic journey traces a passage from the visible to the sensible. In the early 1980s, he used ink as his primary language and became a pioneer of experimental ink painting in China. Those works centered on ‘qi yun’—the rhythm of breath and spirit—where brush and ink unfolded through the layering of time, carrying the subtle pulse of life intrinsic to the Eastern tradition. After moving to the United States in 1988, Shen turned from brushwork toward the ontology of painting. Confronting the weight of Western abstraction, he did not imitate but questioned: the density of pigment, the layering of time, the breath within the surface. Gradually, he shed traces of the brush, allowing gray to evolve from background to structure, and light to move through the canvas like a slow inhalation. 

 

Shen Chen — Recent Works refines this trajectory to its quietest intensity. The canvas becomes a single plane of breath; matter dissolves into the residue of qi and the slow drift of light. Layers of pigment overlap and evaporate, reviving the spirit of ‘liubai’—emptiness and pause—within contemporary materials. The palette narrows to an almost monochrome tone; edges blur like mist, and form vibrates faintly with light. To truly see these paintings, the viewer must decelerate, even pause, to sense the barely perceptible shifts. If his early works sought the movement of qi, these pursue its condensation. Painting here no longer depicts—it trains time: through the breathing of color, the compression of layers, and the gradual dematerialization of matter. This minimalism is not absence but alchemy, a distillation from density to transparency, from form to void. Gray becomes not neutrality, but existence itself—a threshold between being and nonbeing. 

 

In an age of visual excess, Shen’s gray resists speed and noise. When everything demands visibility, he chooses obscurity; when language inflates, he turns the canvas into breath. His silence is not retreat but will—a faith that painting can reach the spirit’s depth. From the qi yun of ink, to stratified abstraction, to near-transparent gray, his path is continual purification. Each simplification asks: after language collapses, can painting still speak? Within gray’s stillness, the subtlest vibration persists—the tremor between seeing and being seen, where poetry meets quiet light.

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Shen Chen, a leading figure in minimalist gray, has exhibited at the National Art Museum of China (Beijing, 1988), San Shang Museum (Hangzhou, 2010), NanHai Art Center (San Francisco, 2019), White Rabbit Museum (Sydney, 2020), and Chun Art Museum (Shanghai, 2023). His works are held in major collections including Ningbo Museum of Art (Ningbo), Shanghai University (Shanghai), Sagacity Art Foundation (Hong Kong), J&J Art Foundation (New York), Stibbe Collection (Amsterdam), Axel & May Foundation (Antwerp), and ME Collection (Berlin).