Susan Chen (American, b. 1992, Hong Kong SAR) is an artist and oil painter living and working in New York City.
Her work in recent years has explored community portraiture, autobiographical self-portraits, and conceptual still lifes. In 2024, she expanded her painting practice to include en plein air landscapes and ceramics. Since graduate school, she has 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’ lived experiences, she continues to discover painting’s magical ability to survey communities, and is driven by the political potential of painting as a catalyst for social change.

Chen was born into a family of illiterate 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 period of 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.