Right: Hilda Shen, Tower, clay and glaze, 2019, 15.5 x 3.5 x 2 inches
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Years ago, I took an art history class in Chinese landscape painting. It was broadening but almost farcically daunting, attempting to cover the art of 13 major Chinese dynasties in just 15 weeks. Nevertheless, it got me started. Asian art has long been a de facto independent study project for me. Most of the Chinese art that has attracted me was made not by celebrated official court painters but rather by former politicians who became poets in exile or, often, scholar monks. The latter reminded me of Herman Melville’s “isolatoes” – artists who rejected the “common continent of men,” living instead on “separate continents of their own.” Hilda Shen, whose solo sculpture show “Beyond This” is now up at Starr Suites, possesses the sensibilities of both her Chinese forebears and the isolatoes of the American Renaissance, who overlap by way of the Asian and Emersonian philosophies of nature.
In a speech at the Chinese Embassy in 1860, Ralph Waldo Emerson himself remarked that “nature creates in the East the uncontrollable yearning to escape from limitation into the vast and boundless.” Shen’s ceramic works, while recognizably contemporary, reflect that impulse by uncannily incorporating over 5,000 years of Chinese art history in blended hints of mountains, wind, water, and other natural phenomena. Her objects are advanced replications of Chinese art, and part of an ongoing conversation about it. They operate like Chinese Scholars’ Rocks, cultivated natural forms that invite contemplation – organic objects containing multitudes.
Many of Shen’s sculptures seem global in scope, with hemispheric divisions, precariously perched on stands and carried, like the Earth itself according to some mythologies, on the back of a cosmic turtle. Some seem to contemplate the fullness of civilization, like the Tower of Babel, others the structure of nature, though there is plenty of crossover.
Shen once said to me, “Sculpture is the most sublime form in art”. That’s not a statement that a dedicated painter can easily swallow, but she has made a strong case. Shen’s sculptures, in their cultivation, craft, and conveyance of deep time, are at once earthy, global, and personal. They are also fantastical and improbable, much like Italo Calvino’s fables in Invisible Cities, in which an inherited history prompts the creation of an alternative journey – a highly rewarding one – to an imaginary place. Shen’s, of course, are shaped by her hand.
“Hilda Shen: Beyond This,” Starr Suites, 281 Starr Street, #1R, Brooklyn, NY. Through June 7, 2026.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.
