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.