Sisi Qin

To me, the canvas isn’t just a surface to be looked at; it’s a deep sea of emotions. Creating art is like diving deep into that sea, over and over again. The hustle and loneliness I’ve soaked up from every street and alley in Shanghai, the tensions and longings built up by the city’s relentless pace—all of it crystallizes into raw, unfiltered emotions that demand to be given visual form the moment I step into my studio.

My brushstrokes are direct transcriptions of a heartbeat: fierce scratches, fluid drips, quiet expanses of color. They don’t aim to “represent” anything; they are simply the physical traces of emotions as they are. Every piece tells the story of a complete inner journey—the brewing of a feeling, its outburst, the tangled mess that follows, and finally, the calm of resolution and release.

As a post-90s painter, I grew up in an era of information overload, where the line between virtual and real blurs constantly. Our experiences are layered, fleeting, fragmented—and yet, we crave nothing more than authenticity and depth. Abstraction, to me, is the perfect language to capture these emotional currents of my generation. It doesn’t paint the world’s outward appearance; it lays bare the quiet tremors of the inner self.

I graduated from the Shanghai Institute of Arts and Crafts, choosing the most straightforward way to confront the soul—abstraction.