Susan Chen (American, b. 1992, Hong Kong SAR) is a visual artist and oil painter based in New York City.
Her recent work spans collaborative community portraiture, self-portraiture, conceptual still lifes, and plein air landscapes. Through these paintings, she tells stories that reflect on socio-political psychologies, exploring themes of race, community, belonging, identity, family, longing, love, and loss. Since graduate school, she has collaborated with over a hundred individuals in the studio, drawn from diverse backgrounds — many from the Asian diaspora and beyond. Deeply curious about her sitters' lived experiences, she continues to discover painting's capacity to survey communities. More recently, she expanded into plein air landscape painting, a practice that began almost by accident during summer trips to Cape Cod and has since grown into a body of forty works. Chen is often driven by painting's potential as a catalyst for social change.

Chen was born into a family of farmers, factory workers, and undocumented immigrants turned merchants from rural villages in China and Taiwan. Her parents immigrated to Hong Kong in the late 1980s for factory work, and she grew up moving between Hong Kong — a former British colony — and the United Kingdom during the Hong Kong handover. At age twelve, she began commuting twice a year between a small apartment in Hong Kong and an all-girls British boarding school in England on scholarship. She later moved to the United States for college, where she became a first-generation American citizen.

Susan is a 2025 Creative Capital Grant Winner, 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, in multiple issues of New American Paintings, and has been covered by The New York Times, CNN, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Artsy, Cultured Magazine, PBS, and more. Chen's first solo exhibitions were presented with Meredith Rosen Gallery, Night Gallery, and Rachel Uffner Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum, the Aldrich Museum, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brandeis University, Songwon Art Center in Seoul, and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Chinese in America, Yuz Museum Shanghai, and the Brown University Investment Office, among others.