Susan Chen, Courtney on Doyers Street, 2024. Oil on linen. Photo by Kris Graves
Susan Chen, Courtney on Doyers Street, 2024. Oil on linen. Photo by Kris Graves
Susan Chen, Courtney on Doyers Street, detail, 2024. Oil on linen. Photo by Kris Graves
Chinatown Girl Scouts: Past & Present
Susan Chen paints impasto community portraits that explore topics of identity, race, and social change by collaborating with individuals from diverse backgrounds to capture their lived experiences.
Artist BioChinatown Girl Scouts: Past & Present involves creating oil portraits of Manhattan’s Chinatown Girl Scouts, an official USA Girl Scout troop (Troop #3197) that has served Chinatown for 100 years. Despite this remarkable history, the troop’s contributions are largely undocumented in Chinatown or American art history. Chen is collaborating with current Girl Scouts, their leaders, and administrators, organizing for these teens to sit for portraits in her studio. During these sessions, they discuss their experiences growing up in Chinatown and their unique perspective as Girl Scouts. The high schoolers come from diverse Asian backgrounds and live across NYC’s five boroughs but gather weekly in Chinatown for their volunteer work. In recognition of their participation, Chen is also co-designing a Painting Badge for their Girl Scout sashes.
Alongside these sessions, Chen is researching photographs from the Museum of Chinese in America’s archives to enrich her understanding of the Girl Scouts’ century-long history in Chinatown. This research and the sitters’ stories will inspire a series of oil portraits—both individual and group pieces—with backgrounds set on different Chinatown streets. Each portrait aims to convey the significance of Chinatown to today’s Girl Scouts and the impact of gentrification, the construction of the world’s tallest mega-jail, and post-pandemic transformations on the neighborhood. The paintings will weave together personal narratives and the evolving social landscape of Chinatown, capturing both individual identities and the community’s broader story.
Susan Chen
Long Island City, NY
Susan Chen (American, b. 1992, Hong Kong) is an artist and oil painter in New York City whose work has centered on community portraiture. Since earning her MFA from Columbia University in 2020, she has collaborated with over a hundred individuals in the studio from diverse backgrounds. Deeply curious about her sitters’ experiences, her paintings explore themes of race, community, immigration, prejudice, identity, family, longing, love, and loss.
Chen is a 2022 Forbes Under 30 North America Honoree, 2022 Artsy Vanguard Artist, and 2020 Hopper Prize Winner. Chen presented her debut New York solo exhibition, On Longing, at Meredith Rosen Gallery in 2020, and her debut Los Angeles solo exhibition, I Am Not A Virus, at Night Gallery in 2021. Her recent solo shows at Rachel Uffner Gallery featured a collection of Purell bottles (2023) and large-scale oil paintings and ceramics highlighting women’s advocacy following changes to Roe v. Wade (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brandeis University Kniznick Gallery, The Aldrich Museum, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, and Songwon Art Center in South Korea. In 2022, Chen was an Artist-in-Residence at Silver Art Projects, where she participated in their Social Justice & Activism Program. Chen’s work can be found in the Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum of Chinese in America, Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and the Yuz Museum Shanghai.
Chen’s painting Chinatown Block Watch (2022) is currently on view in the American Wing of the Brooklyn Museum, in the Museum’s 200th Anniversary Exhibition, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art.