Tangying Shen is a Chinese-born artist currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose practice spans painting, ceramics, and visual storytelling. Originally trained in 3D animation and storyboarding, Shen gradually shifted toward slower, more tactile mediums—seeking new ways to explore identity, embodiment, and cultural memory. Her work does not shout; instead, it speaks in quiet, deliberate tones. Through a broken shard of ceramic, a slowly evolving portrait, or a vessel etched with layered historical motifs, Shen constructs a visual language that resists spectacle while quietly holding space for memory, gendered experience, and ancestral connection.
Her painting Escalation, which explores multiethnic feminist solidarity, was exhibited at the New Museum Los Gatos and featured in Artistonish Magazine. Her ceramic series Legacy draws on the traditional Yuhuchunping form to investigate the links between the body, the land, and cultural inheritance. Other notable works, such as She’s No Longer in the Shadows and We Have Been There Before, have been featured in Passage of Life: Aging – 2025 and the Naturalist Gallery Portrait Collection. Through slow, sensitive forms, Shen evokes a quietly powerful visual voice—one shaped by a distinctly female perspective and a deeply felt connection to both place and history.
She’s No Longer in the Shadows: A Side Profile, A Freed Spirit
This painting marks Shen’s second portrait of the same woman—her former roommate, shown again in a quiet side profile. Though the angle remained identical, two years had passed, and the person before her had completely changed.
At the time of the first portrait, her subject was in what Shen described as a “seemingly stable but inwardly anxious relationship.” Through composed and polite on the surface, there was a subtle, deeply embodied tension—a persistent vigilance, a quiet self-containment.
“She always looked as if she was bracing for impact, never letting herself fully relax,” Shen recalled.
Years later, Shen came across a new photo of her, and something had shifted. “Her posture was so relaxed, her smile effortless. She wasn’t performing. She wasn’t worried about how others saw her.” Shen was moved to paint her again—not to capture her appearance, but to reflect this profound inner transformation.
“She no longer lived in anxiety about the future or guilt over the past. She didn’t see herself as a ‘strong woman’—and that’s what made her strength so real. She simply lived each day, calmly and fully.”
She’s No Longer in the Shadows captures the quiet moment when a woman finds freedom—not in dramatic rebirth, but in a subtle awakening. She is no longer defined by relationships or outside expectations, nor does she feel shame over emotion. It’s a form of resistance that whispers rather than shouts—intimate, quiet, and enduring.
Escalation: A Shared Face, A Collective Pulse
If She’s No Longer in the Shadows traces one woman’s shift, Escalation speaks to a collective.
While researching American women’s history, Shen was struck by the spirit of female solidarity that transcended race and time. From 19th-century suffrage movements to the joint struggles of Black and Indigenous women in the 20th century, she saw quiet yet foundational acts of collective resistance.
“What moved me most was that they didn’t fight only for themselves. They kept finding ways to gather women across groups, across barriers.”
Escalation is a portrait—but not of any single person. It’s a composite face, built from layers of cultural references: facial features constructed from diverse skin tones, garments inspired by East African scarves, Central Asian textiles, and Indigenous American adornments. Shen layered techniques—flat color fields, woodcut-like lines, impasto, and digital marks—to form a visual polyphony.
“I wanted to create a multilingual visual space, like the women themselves—fragmented, non-uniform, but coexisting.”
The painting is vivid and saturated, not with anger, but with collective heat—like a pulse building over time. Shen’s vision is ultimately hopeful: even with cracks, we remain whole; even in difference, we form a shared image.
Legacy: Tracing Culture from the Ground Up
In Shen’s ceramic series Legacy, a recurring form appears: the Yuhuchunping, an ancient Chinese vessel. Her intention goes beyond homage—she asks how we might continue to echo cultural origins amid fracture and hybridity.
“The Yuhuchunping isn’t just an aesthetic form. Its curves, glazes, and patterns respond to each era’s spirit. They’re historical markers, embedded in clay.”
She hand-shapes each vessel, leaving fingerprints, pressure marks, even collapse. “I’m not copying a historical standard. I want my hands—my understanding of culture now—to be visible on the object.”
On these vessels, Shen fuses Song dynasty blue-and-white motifs with rhythmic lacquer forms from the Warring States period. She darkens rim sections to simulate fracture, using overlapping glazes to recreate the layered visual memory of fired clay. Tradition and the present collide on every inch of the surface.
“I wanted to start with the earth. ‘Home’ isn’t a concept in a history book—it’s the warmth in your hands when you hold soil. That’s where the question of ‘where I come from’ begins to feel real.”
In Legacy, culture is not a relic but an act—something we shape, preserve, and alter through each gesture. Shen’s vessels hold not just echoes of the past but the ongoing effort to rearticulate where we belong.
Gentle, but Uncompromising
Though Shen’s work often engages weighty subjects—identity, gender, collective memory—she remains committed to a quiet pace and tender tone. “I’m not trying to shock anyone. I care more about whether a piece can make someone pause—to leave a little space for themselves.” She hopes to eventually move her work beyond white walls, into libraries, secondhand shops, and community corridors—letting art live alongside the everyday.
For Shen, gentleness is not retreat; it is another form of strength. Her world is made of fragments—a face, a history, a body, a symbol. But these fragments never shatter. They interlace, carry, and rebuild—forming a quiet, resilient response to a complex world.