Lena

About

Lena

Painter · b. 2000, Shanghai

Personal narrative and social fact are not separate territories. A practice that starts from her own experience keeps colliding with larger public events — and Lena uses that collision to ask viewers to look again at where they stand.

Currently completing graduate study at East China Normal University, she builds the small dramas of a life with bold, certain brushwork — staging everyday scenes in strange tones and contrary forms until they turn suddenly unfamiliar, almost surreal. Each picture seems frozen at a dramatic beat, yet hums with the undercurrent that set it in motion: a hint of some larger story waiting behind it.

In an age of extreme weather and escalating conflict, her people and animals sit under the same low haze — roaring in silence against a shared unease. She calls the aim simply: reframing the present.

Featured in Art China · IDEAT · AD China · Figaro

A roughly modelled magenta cat sculpture in the corner of the gallery.
Cat · Painted sculpture · 2024

In her words

From a conversation around the show

Why the bright, high-saturation colour?
The colour comes from intuition. Saturated paint is more alive as it flows — and that aliveness is exactly what I’m after: a truer, freer image, and a freer state to work in.
Why work so large?
A big canvas simply has more room — to lay things out, to add elements and let the story get richer, and to leave space for the paint to run and for me to keep re-working it.
The three series — Wildmen, Film, Animals — what do they mean?
Each marks a stage of thinking. The animals lean on their spirit and a little narrative; the film works fold a story together with my own reading of it; the wildmen are about a more honest, freer relationship between people.
Where does the work come from?
My own experience, mostly — and films, books, blogs, documentaries.
And when the inspiration isn’t there?
Empty out. Go learn something from another field, or just go for a walk.
How would you describe your style?
Rough and real. In pursuit of freedom.
How do you develop it?
Keep trying, paint over, try again.
What do you hope the work does, later on?
Hard to say. They’re a snapshot of this stretch of my life — how I read the moment I’m in. I just hope they keep getting richer, and freer.

Selected exhibitions

2022 – 2025