Susan Chen is an artist and oil painter currently living and working in New York City.
Her work in recent years has centered on community portraiture and conceptual still lifes. Since graduate school, she has felt fortunate to have collaborated with over a hundred different individuals in the studio — many of whom are members of the Asian diaspora and beyond. Her paintings explore themes of race, community, immigration, prejudice, identity, family, longing, love, and loss. Deeply curious about her sitters’ experiences, she continues to discover painting’s magical ability to survey communities and is driven by the political potential of figurative painting to enact social change.

Chen was born to a family of illiterate farmers, factory workers, and illegal immigrants turned merchants who originated from rural China and Taiwan villages. Her parents immigrated to Hong Kong in the late 1980s for factory work, and she subsequently grew up between Hong Kong (a former British colony) and the United Kingdom during the Hong Kong handover. From the age of twelve, Chen began commuting between a small apartment in Hong Kong and an all-girls British boarding school in England on a bi-yearly basis on scholarship. For college, she moved to the United States, becoming a first-generation American citizen.

Chen is a 2022 Forbes Under 30 North America Honoree, 2022 Artsy Vanguard Artist, and 2020 Hopper Prize Winner. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2020 and her BA Honors from Brown University in 2015. In 2022, she was an Artist-in-Residence at Silver Art Projects in their Social Justice & Activism program at the World Trade Center. Her work has been featured on the cover of New York Magazine, multiple issues of New American Paintings, and covered by The New York Times, CNN, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Artsy, Cultured Magazine, PBS, and more. Her first solo exhibitions were presented with Meredith Rosen Gallery, Night Gallery, and Rachel Uffner Gallery.