Interwoven Journeys: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Type and Feeling
Once we encounter the work of Shujing Shen, what strikes us first is just not the medium, however the temper. Born in China, formed by years in New Zealand, and now based mostly in the UK, Shen brings a layered sensitivity to her mixed-media apply. From digital portray and Riso printing to cloth sculpture and XR, every medium acts not simply as a software, however as an emotional register. Her coaching—first on the Royal School of Artwork, then in Digital Actuality on the London School of Communication—provides her a fluency in each analog and immersive varieties. However what resonates most is her means to translate a life lived throughout cultures into a visible language that feels neither international nor acquainted, however deeply felt.
This cross-cultural elasticity is obvious in works like Within the Park, a digital portray that resists simple categorization. We sense the rhythm of Tai Chi in its composition—flowing, intuitive, and quietly grounded. On the identical time, there’s an emotional take away, a dreamlike gaze that displays Shen’s place as each participant and observer in Western city life. These pictures really feel remembered greater than rendered—imbued with what we’d name “emotional hindsight.” They ask us not simply to look, however to linger. What looks as if simplicity reveals itself as an invite: to decelerate, to really feel extra, to hearken to the silence inside the scene.
Shen’s early love of drawing, which first surfaced in childhood experiments with partitions and located objects, echoes all through her work right now. Even when working with superior XR software program, that very same intuitive, tactile impulse stays. Her inventive evolution—from a pupil of finance to a sculptor of sensation—was much less a pivot than a gradual return. Immersing herself in London’s inventive communities, Shen discovered herself leaning into messiness, intuition, and course of over perfection. Her trajectory reminds us that artwork is just not solely about self-discipline or coaching, however about tuning into emotion, reminiscence, and the often-fragmented means we expertise the world.
Shujing Shen: Drawing Emotion Via Colour and Curiosity
On the core of Shen’s visible vocabulary is a uncommon mix of playfulness and precision. We’re struck by how confidently she leans into daring shade, irregular type, and the unfiltered logic of childhood. Her pictures don’t goal to decode the world, however to really feel via it. With every brushstroke or soft-edged determine, she traces a reminiscence or temper simply on the fringe of articulation. What outcomes is figure that feels open, weak, and refreshingly free from pretension.
In Within the Park, this emotional openness takes the form of light park scenes—figures resting, strolling, respiratory. We’d learn these as moments of nothingness, however they hum with one thing deeper. There’s a quiet reverence in Shen’s compositions that recollects the teachings of David Hockney: that magnificence lives within the strange, if solely we select to see it. Her work doesn’t power us to really feel—it merely holds area for feeling, permitting our personal associations to floor. The simplified varieties, rhythmic spacing, and smooth transitions of shade usually are not simply stylistic selections; they’re emotional cues.
We additionally see the affect of artists like David Shrigley and Tara Sales space, whose practices prioritize sincerity, humor, and awkwardness over polish. Shen, too, resists the temptation to over-explain. As an alternative, her work gestures towards emotional states—some joyful, others unsure—and lets imperfection dwell comfortably inside them. On this means, her visible storytelling speaks much less via narrative and extra via empathy. The outcome is not only an image, however a felt expertise: vibrant, introspective, and typically slightly uncooked.
The Artwork of Stillness: Creating Via Exhaustion and Empathy
Nowhere is Shen’s emotional acuity extra palpable than in her sculptural piece Resting Chair. We first encountered it as a sketch—uncooked, virtually computerized, born from a second of whole exhaustion. That it later turned a three-dimensional object feels inevitable on reflection. Composed of recycled supplies—an outdated costume, yellow thread, a discarded heating panel—the sculpture slumps into itself. It doesn’t operate as a chair, however as an emblem of what it means to want relaxation, to embody fatigue.
As viewers, we’re not requested to admire the thing, however to really feel with it. There’s one thing unflinchingly trustworthy about the way in which it fails to carry itself up. It reminds us of days when our personal our bodies really feel equally weighted, equally smooth. Shen doesn’t sanitize this vulnerability—she builds it into the work’s very type. And by doing so, she transforms private depletion right into a shared expertise of recognition. The piece doesn’t converse loudly, but it surely speaks deeply. It whispers, “You’re allowed to cease.”
Resting Chair additionally showcases Shen’s considerate materials use—her perception that even forgotten or damaged issues carry emotional resonance. Nothing in her work is bigoted. Each thread and texture holds a little bit of life, of reminiscence, of care. This layered method permits the sculpture to behave as greater than an artwork object; it turns into a form of emotional surrogate. In a world that always prizes productiveness and polish, Resting Chair affords us one thing much more radical: permission to be undone.
Embodied Metaphor: Bulimia (2023)
With Bulimia, Shen takes us someplace completely totally different—deep contained in the human physique, the place surreal varieties and emotional complexity collide. This XR challenge marks a tonal departure from her softer works, but it surely retains the identical deep emotional readability that defines her apply. Set inside a stylized digestive system, Bulimia turns into an embodied metaphor for psychological well being—significantly the cyclical push and pull of consuming problems.
Right here, Shen’s immersive storytelling prospers. Donning a headset, we don’t merely witness a story—we enter it. We drift via uncanny landscapes full of writhing flora, pulsing textures, and tactile discomfort. The setting is unsettling, even grotesque at occasions, however all the time tender in its emotional goal. It avoids the coldness of scientific illustration and as an alternative carves out an area for empathy, reflection, and complexity.
What we admire most is how Shen maintains her sense of care even inside disquieting subject material. Somewhat than depict affected by a distance, she creates an allegorical area that lets viewers really feel the expertise from inside. Bulimia doesn’t simplify or moralize; it makes room for contradiction, ache, and quiet recognition. That is Shen’s hallmark—no matter medium, she creates emotional structure by which we’d discover ourselves, nevertheless uncomfortably.
Shujing Shen: Sketching Reminiscence into Immersive House
Shen’s ongoing exploration of prolonged actuality opens a brand new and compelling chapter in her apply. Her upcoming VR challenge—a hand-drawn, first-person journey via childhood reminiscences—has already begun to reshape our understanding of what immersive artwork could be. It doesn’t depend on spectacle or technical dazzle. As an alternative, it builds an emotional structure, grounded within the smooth textures of reminiscence. Each setting, each object—from a rabbit-shaped puzzle mat to a plastic toy fish—serves as a portal to a different emotional register.
What units this challenge aside is its refusal to prepare reminiscence as linear story. As an alternative, Shen permits the viewer to wander via sensation, to get misplaced inside textures that really feel extra like goals than diaries. The pencil-drawn aesthetic is a stroke of genius—it mirrors the haziness of our personal recollections, the place element is commonly much less vital than emotional weight. Right here, reminiscence isn’t one thing we observe—it’s one thing we inhabit.
We’re reminded that Shen doesn’t view expertise because the endpoint, however as an extension of her emotional toolkit. Whether or not working in clay, fabric, or VR, she is all the time asking: How does this really feel? And extra importantly: Can others really feel it too? This immersive challenge affords not simply entry to Shen’s private previous, however a shared emotional area, the place every of us would possibly acknowledge some model of our personal story. It’s artwork as invitation—quiet, textured, and profoundly human.
