Susan Chen (American, b. 1992, Hong Kong SAR) is an artist and oil painter currently living and working in New York City.
Her work in recent years has explored community portraiture, autobiographical self-portraits, and conceptual still lifes. Since graduate school, she has felt fortunate to have collaborated with over a hundred different individuals in the studio from diverse backgrounds — many of whom are members of the Asian diaspora and beyond. Her paintings explore themes of race, community, belonging, 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 inspire social change.

Chen was born into a family of illiterate farmers, factory workers, and illegal immigrants turned merchants originating 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.

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 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 Bowdoin College Museum of Art, The Aldrich Museum, Brandeis University, Songwon Art Center in Seoul, and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Her work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum of Chinese in America, Yuz Museum Shanghai, Brown University Investment Office, among others.