He Sen

He Sen was born in 1968 in Kaiyuan, Yunnan Province, China. He studied in the Normal Department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts (Sichuan Fine Arts Institute) in Chongqing, where he trained in the expressionist "Sichuan style" under teachers including Zhang Xiaogang, and graduated in 1989. After graduating he was assigned to teach at Chongqing No. 40 Middle School, then resigned in 1991 to work as an artist full time.

Through the 1990s and 2000s he developed his signature combination of dark, photo-realist images of young women and appropriated, expressionistically reworked passages from historical Chinese landscape painting. His profile grew internationally with a 2003 solo exhibition, "Out of the Red," at Primo Marella Gallery in Milan, and in 2008 he held "Come Together," described by critic John Yau as his first important exhibition in New York, at Jack Tilton Gallery. He has continued to exhibit through the 2010s and 2020s in Shanghai, Lugano, and London, including a 2012 solo show at Today Art Museum in Beijing and a 2021 exhibition, "Mindscapes," at HOFA Gallery in London. He Sen lives and works in Beijing.

Writing in The Brooklyn Rail in 2008 on the occasion of "Come Together" at Jack Tilton Gallery, critic John Yau situated He Sen among painters whose work engages with the entrepreneurial culture reshaping his generation in China, and described the show as built around two recurring types of painting: dark, photo-realist images of alluring young Chinese women, and expressionistic appropriations of details from historical Chinese landscape paintings. Yau also noted that while Gerhard Richter is sometimes cited as an influence, He Sen's work is, in his view, more indebted to David Salle, and that the artist's relationship to his historical sources works through appropriation rather than Western cynicism, an intuitive exploration of how traditional images can be carried forward through contemporary painting.

He Sen's market is primarily a primary-market and institutional one, built through long-running relationships with Primo Marella Gallery in Milan and, more recently, HOFA Gallery in London, alongside placement in museum collections including M+ in Hong Kong, the National Art Museum of China, and the White Rabbit Collection in Sydney. He has appeared at major international auction houses, including a lot at Sotheby's "Contemporary Art Asia" sale in New York in 2008 carrying a pre-sale estimate of USD 15,000 to 25,000, but no confirmed, sourced record of a top auction price, whether for that lot or any other, could be established in publicly accessible auction and price databases as of this profile's date. Collectors should treat his secondary market as underdocumented relative to his exhibition and collection history rather than assume that no such history exists.

He Sen is a living, actively exhibiting artist with steady gallery support and a genuine institutional footprint, but he does not have a published catalogue raisonne, and his public auction record is not clearly established in accessible databases. Collectors should verify any specific work through the artist's own archive at hesen.org and through his representing galleries, Primo Marella and HOFA, rather than relying on catalogue documentation, and should treat any claimed auction "record" for his work with caution until it can be traced to a named auction house, lot, and sale date.