Shunxiang Hu (b. 1988, Shandong Province, China) is a painter based in Chengdu whose work moves between portraiture, narrative, and philosophical inquiry, drawing on literature, film, and the history of painting to construct images that are at once intimate and charged with collective meaning. Trained in oil painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2011, Hu approaches the canvas as a space of layered storytelling in which she acts simultaneously as artist, director, and scriptwriter.
Her paintings carry a classical formal quality rooted in her training, while their interior logic is shaped by a deep literary and philosophical sensibility: questions of female identity, human existence, loss, and transformation run through her work without reducing it to illustration. Works such as Neon Wasteland (2025) and Berlin Mood No. 2 (2024) reflect a practice that is alert to its own historical moment while remaining grounded in the sustained attention of figurative painting.
Shunxiang Hu presented new and recent works in Under Shadows, a two-person exhibition at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin from 14 June to 23 August 2025, produced following a residency period in Berlin at the end of 2024.
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Berlin Mood No. 2, 2024 Sold
Shunxiang Hu (b. 1988, Shandong Province, China) completed her studies in oil painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, graduating with a Bachelor's degree in 2011. She lives and works in Chengdu. Born during China's One-Child Policy as a second daughter, Hu was compelled from early life to navigate questions of identity, visibility, and survival that would become central to her artistic practice.
Hu's paintings occupy a space between classical figuration and literary imagination. Her training in oil painting gives her work a formal precision and tonal depth that recalls European traditions, while the conceptual and narrative frameworks she builds around her images are shaped by literature, theatre, and film. In her practice, she functions as artist, director, and screenwriter: her canvases unfold as scenes from stories that are never fully told, populated by figures caught in states of tension, reverie, or quiet crisis. Her work addresses female experience not as a fixed subject but as a lens through which broader questions of human existence, loss, hope, freedom, and transformation become visible. Series such as Nine Gates, Decameron, and The Knight of the Rose demonstrate the range of her literary and historical references, while works such as Neon Wasteland (2025) and Berlin - A Winter's Fairy Tale No. 2 (2024) show how her practice absorbs and transforms the specific conditions of place and time.
Hu has received significant recognition within the Chinese contemporary art world. In 2019 she was awarded the ARTCLOUD China SAP Art Award, and in 2013 she received the Newcomer of the Year Award for young Chinese artists as part of the Dajia Inheritance Awards. She has participated in the N.A.I.C PROJECT x ARTDEPOT Artist-in-Residence program at the Commune by the Great Wall in Beijing, as well as interdisciplinary collaborations including the Beijing International Design Week Expo (2018). Her work has been exhibited at the Guangdong Museum of Art, the Lu Zhongli Museum of Art, the Shanxi Provincial Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles Art Show, among other venues. She was invited to participate in a parallel exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale. In 2024, her works were included in Polyphonic Resonance at the Chun Art Museum in Shanghai, and in Art Monthly: 1974-2024 at the Art Museum of the Nanjing University of the Arts.
At the end of 2024, Shunxiang Hu came to Berlin, where she shared an apartment and studio space provided by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin with Georgian artist Tamara Kvesitadze. The period of shared work and exchange in Berlin gave rise to Under Shadows, a two-person exhibition conceived for KORNFELD Galerie Berlin and on view from 14 June to 23 August 2025. The exhibition, with a curatorial text by Tereza de Arruda, brought together new and recent paintings by both artists under the premise that each had lived under shadow, political, cultural, and personal, and that through their work each steps out of it. Hu's portraits in the exhibition, described as delicate and quietly expressive, reflect on identity in transition, elusive, emotional, and deeply human. Her practice continues to deepen its engagement with the conditions of female existence and the philosophical dimensions of painting, building a body of work that is as historically rooted as it is urgently contemporary.
