The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Using portraiture as a tool for social change, Susan Chen spotlights the challengesand injustices endured by members of the Asian diaspora in the US through firsthand storytelling. The artist typically sources her sitters on social media platforms and paints them from life. Chen establishes relationships with her subjects over the many hours she paints them. Her newest large-scale painting, An Afternoon Making Quaranzines with Apex for Youth, is guided by her experience volunteering as a mentor at Apex for Youth, a New York City community organization based in Chinatown. Chen invited a group of mentors and teenage students from Apex to her studio and painted each individually over a three-hour period. Staged inside a classroom, the women and girls are illustrating zines that describe “collectively the mental health challenges Asian Americans and Asian immigrants face and the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes witnessed by the Asian community during these pandemic years.”