To encounter the work of Tangying (Jane) Shen is to step into a space where historical memory and contemporary agency exist in a continuous, fluid dialogue. 

Based in San Francisco, the multidisciplinary artist, animator, and educator has spent years cultivating a practice that bridges fine art, ceramics, storyboarding, and social engagement. Rather than treating heritage as an untouchable relic preserved behind museum glass, Shen approaches Chinese artistic traditions as a living, evolving vernacular; one capable of probing complex realities around identity, gender, and intergenerational power dynamics.

“What sets me apart is my ability to bridge animation, visual storytelling, and contemporary fine art,” Shen explains. “My background in storyboarding influences the way I construct paintings, ceramics, and interactive works, allowing each piece to tell a narrative while addressing themes of identity, resilience, and social issues as a Chinese woman in America.”

This distinct synthesis of narrative discipline and conceptual depth has established Shen as a compelling voice within contemporary art dialogues. She is currently showing works in the international group exhibition Anti-WAR 2026, presented by Exhibizone and Biafarin, running from July 11 through September 11, 2026. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on war, loss, resilience, memory, and the urgent hope for peace.

She is showing a painting in the exhibition called “The Bloom Beyond,” a plant symbolizing a young woman’s break into freedom from controlling family structures. “Her bloom speaks not of rebellion, but of the right to selfhood, independence, and freedom,” explains the artist. The painting was created in 2025. 

Shen’s work has been showcased across competitive, curated, and juried venues, including the New Museum Los Gatos, Las Laguna Art Gallery, Works/San José, Chopsticks Alley Art, and the American Artists Professional League. Her piece Fear Becomes Big If You Don’t Face It was acquired by Las Laguna Art Gallery, while her glazed ceramic portrait Anxious was selected for the international Aesthetics exhibition organized by Gallerium Art.

Central to Shen’s investigation of heritage is her engagement with traditional Chinese craft forms, particularly qinghua (blue-and-white porcelain). Historically developed through Tang dynasty experiments with Persian cobalt and perfected during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, blue-and-white porcelain became a globally recognized symbol of status, purity, and artistic mastery.

In pieces like Legacy, Shen directly traces the motifs of classical Yuhu Chun (jade pear-shaped) vases, incorporating scrolling lotus patterns, landscapes, and dragons. However, her engagement goes beyond historicism.

“I chose some of the most recognizable motifs found in traditional Chinese ceramics because, to me, they’re more than decoration—they’re a visual language,” Shen says. “Landscapes reflect the relationship between people and nature, dragons represent cultural identity and spiritual beliefs, while flowers and lotus vines symbolize life, prosperity, and continuity.”

Shen notes that while the exact dynasty of a ceramic piece might escape the average observer, its quintessential “Chineseness” remains instantly recognizable. “That recognition comes from collective visual memory rather than historical knowledge,” she reflects. “Many people see Chinese cultural heritage as something historic, only to be seen in museums, but I see it as something living. My work isn’t really about ceramics—it’s about how a culture continues to evolve while remaining recognizable.”

Shen’s fluid movement across mediums is rooted in her rigorous interdisciplinary background. Having earned an MFA in Storyboarding from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and built a career in visual narrative, including storyboarding for feature films like The Other Side of Infinity, she applies a cinematic sensibility to static and sculptural forms. For Shen, storytelling is another way of keeping culture alive, allowing historical experiences to be continuously reinterpreted by contemporary audiences.

“Storyboarding taught me to think about storytelling before anything else,” Shen notes. “I think about what the viewer notices first, what they discover next, and what feeling they leave with. Rather than explaining ideas directly, I try to build an experience that allows viewers to discover them for themselves.”

This cinematic framework is especially evident in her material experimentation. Having studied traditional watercolor in China before relocating to the United States, Shen later began applying fluid watercolor glazing techniques directly onto raw ceramic clay.

“I didn’t start learning ceramics until I came to the U.S., but one day I began applying my watercolor techniques to clay,” she shares. “What excited me most was never knowing exactly how the colors would look after the piece came out of the kiln. It made me appreciate traditional Chinese underglaze painting in a completely different way. I finally understood why artists have loved this technique for centuries.”

Beyond aesthetic synthesis, Shen’s practice frequently explores social commentary, using personal and cultural specificity to address universal human experiences.

In her dramatic charcoal piece Deviation, Shen tackles the nuanced psychological boundaries within traditional Asian family structures. The work explores the subtle line where parental devotion can inadvertently transform into control.

“Deviation is rooted in my personal experience and the dynamics of the traditional Chinese family, where love, sacrifice, and discipline are deeply intertwined,” Shen explains. “However, the cultural specificity is the starting point of the work, not its boundary. I didn’t want to reduce this relationship to a stereotype or portray parents as villains; their control often comes from genuine care, yet it can quietly limit a child’s independence. Rather than criticizing a culture, Deviation asks a simple question: ‘when protection begins to replace a person’s ability to choose, has care quietly become control?’”

This balance between cultural respect and gentle critique defines Shen’s conceptual framework. “Respecting a culture doesn’t mean freezing it in time,” she emphasizes. “It means allowing it to continue evolving while staying true to its identity. Living in the Bay Area made me see my own culture from a different perspective. It encouraged me to ask why certain traditions still matter today and how they shape our identity.” For Shen, questioning tradition is not about rejecting it, but allowing it to evolve. 

Shen’s commitment to social engagement extends outward to themes of female solidarity and cross-cultural representation. In Escalation, as well as her featured works in the VOTE! exhibition at Works/San José, Shen examines solidarity across racial and national lines.

“Growing up in China gave me one perspective, and living in the U.S. helped me realize that many of the questions I care about aren’t unique to a single culture,” she says. “In Escalation, the women come from different cultural and racial backgrounds, yet together they form one face. Our differences don’t stand in the way of solidarity—they’re part of what makes it stronger.” Just as cultures evolve through exchange, solidarity is strengthened through diversity rather than uniformity.

Shen’s artistic trajectory illustrates the vitality of contemporary Asian diasporic art. Beyond her studio practice, she has dedicated years to arts education, designing visual art curricula for young artists and conducting artist talks at institutions like the New Museum Los Gatos and Chopsticks Alley Art.

“In addition to my studio practice, I have spent several years teaching visual arts, which has strengthened my belief that art should communicate across generations, languages, and communities,” Shen adds.

There’s a particular moment standing in front of one of Janet Pulcho’s paintings when the scale stops feeling like spectacle and starts feeling like an argument. From a distance, the works read almost impossibly large for watercolor. Up close, the question shifts. The real surprise isn’t their size but how completely they trust the medium to carry it.

The artist’s practice has evolved with unusual clarity.Her early large-scale floral watercolors already questioned what watercolor was capable of carrying, not only physically, but emotionally. The flowers were never simply botanical subjects, they became a means of pushing the medium beyond its familiar limits. The Renaissance series feels less like a new chapter than the point where those formal and technical investigations begin to engage directly with the history of painting.

That discipline is evident throughout Pulcho’s work. Even in her largest compositions, nothing feels arbitrary. The flowers have remarkable anatomical precision, yet they never become botanical illustrations. Instead, they exist in constant tension with the loose, fluid environments surrounding them. Petals are carefully articulated, while backgrounds dissolve into broad washes, stains and drifting movement that resist description. The flower remains exact. Everything around it doesn’t. Much of the emotional force of the paintings lives in that contrast.

The Renaissance series expands this language without abandoning it. After moving to Florence and studying at the Florence Academy of Art, Pulcho immersed herself in Renaissance painting. What emerged wasn’t a series of reinterpretations in the conventional sense. She isn’t interested in quoting masterpieces or reproducing familiar compositions. In fact, many viewers may never recognize the references at all.

Recognition arrives slowly. It comes through the balance of a composition, the distribution of visual weight, the rhythm of forms or the quiet sense that the painting carries a memory from somewhere else. Pulcho borrows the architecture of Renaissance painting rather than its imagery. That distinction matters. Instead of illustrating art history, she rebuilds some of its visual principles through flowers.

One of the best examples is Madonna and the Goldfinch. Instead of human figures, Raphael’s devotional scene is expressed through dramatic peonies, with the goldfinch still preserved as an important symbolic element. Despite the changes to the original composition, its deeper meaning remains intact. What was once a religious image is reimagined through contemporary floral forms in a way that feels natural and contemporary, without becoming nostalgic or forced.

The Battle of Flowers presents an even more ambitious reinterpretation. Although the original scene is no longer directly recognizable, Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano remains the starting point for the composition. The movement of the horses, the strong diagonal lines, and the sense of tension from the battlefield are still present, but the soldiers and their armor have been replaced by rich fields of peonies and hydrangeas. Pulcho isn’t recreating Uccello’s painting. She’s rebuilding the mechanics of it inside an entirely different visual vocabulary. The result feels surprisingly convincing. Once the structure reveals itself, it’s impossible to stop seeing it.

That balance has become increasingly characteristic of Pulcho’s practice. Her earlier monumental flowers challenged expectations of watercolor through scale and technical ambition. The newer works ask a more interesting question: what happens when that same technical language begins carrying centuries of visual memory? The answer isn’t nostalgia, nor is it pastiche. It’s a body of work that treats the Renaissance not as something to imitate but as something still capable of generating new images.

Looking to spend the weekend surrounded by art? From immersive digital worlds to rare installations, here are four art exhibitions worth adding to your plans this weekend.

A Likely Story — Bell House, Dulwich

Historic Bell House becomes part of the exhibition in Rosie Bayliss’ latest solo show, where newly created paintings and drawings respond directly to the Georgian rooms and the surrounding gardens. Figures appear suspended in moments of quiet contemplation as domestic interiors blur into imagined landscapes. Visitors are encouraged to consider how architecture and everyday spaces shape the stories we tell ourselves. Best of all, admission is completely free.

Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography — Dulwich Picture Gallery

Spanning more than 100 years of photography, this major exhibition charts the changing face of American cities through the people who built and transformed them. Bringing together work by more than thirty influential photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson, the exhibition captures everything from bustling streets and neighbourhood life to moments of crucial protest and social change.

FRAMELESS — Marble Arch

If you’d prefer to step inside the work of art instead of admiring it from afar, FRAMELESS remains one of London’s most ambitious immersive art experiences. Across four large-scale digital galleries, masterpieces by artists including Monet, Van Gogh, Dalí, Kandinsky and Klimt are reimagined through floor-to-ceiling projections, sound and interactive technology.

Ana Mendieta — Tate Modern

One of the summer’s most significant exhibitions, Tate Modern’s retrospective celebrates the pioneering Cuban-American artist whose work bridged sculpture, performance, photography and film. Bringing together her iconic Silueta series alongside rarely seen installations and moving-image works, the exhibition explores Mendieta’s enduring engagement with feminism and the body’s relationship to the natural world.